CODEWITHSUNDEEP
restful-architecture
deepinder
deepinder

Reputation: 131

User friendly and restful (rails 3)

i am a rails programmer who is on to his 3rd project now (new of course).I am looking for an answer to a general question about Restful architecture. I am sure i am doing something that has a good established answer already.

In restful approach we expose resources but some times this approach feels a little Non user friendly. For example i can expose a product via a show method and then i have another resource called sales that i can expose via product/:id/sales show template to show all sales for a product. But i am taking the user through an extra click here. The ideal will be to show product and all its associated sales on one page itself. But that is a violation of the Restful rule.

I just wanted to ask that are these rules generally broken to make the site user friendly? Being a new comer i dont want to adopt ways that are non ideal so i thought i should ask this question.

Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 53

Answers (1)

aaron
aaron

Reputation: 894

Adding in the sales for a particular product would not be breaking any constraints from the RESTful architecture. You have the product ID in the HTTP request so you can just also get the sales for that product. Your separation of concerns should not be affected and you don't need to store a state to get this information. Just extend the model that you return with the view.

It seems like you are more concerned with straying from the convention over configuration that Rails promotes. This extension means that your model will not correlate with only one table in your database, but that is fine. The conventions are meant to reduce the configuration work that you need to do, not restrict your functionality.

Upvotes: 1

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