How to be RESTful in Ruby on Rails?

Question

I have a decent amount of experience with rails, but I've always been a bit ad hoc with my development methods. I'm curious about how to be properly RESTful in rails. Here's an example of an app I'm working on now:

I have a few models, including a User, Pack, and Product model. The models each have a controller associated with them. If I want to create a new page called 'Dashboard', on which the User can create new records on the Pack model, as well as see their account information, how do I do this in a restful way? Do I create a new controller called Dashboard? Or do I add it to a controller that defines my 'Static Pages'? What's the best practice regarding pages that aren't exclusive to the actions on one model?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

To supplement the answers already given, REST really exists to make an easily-consumable API. (Notably, Roy Fielding's work is in the area of APIs, and REST is built on top of HTTP methods that HTML doesn't allow.)

This has been a common stumbling block since RESTful routing debuted in Rails; people get the impression that every controller now needs to be RESTful and that the front end and API should never diverge. Frequently, though, the front end and API have different needs.

For resources you want to be accessible via an API—Products, Users, Packs—trying to be RESTful is ideal. For those sorts of uses, pdobb's advice to have one controller per resource is generally exactly what you're looking for. They make sense in the context of an API being consumed by a machine.

But what about the dashboard? Dashboards are generally an HTML view intended to be rendered in a browser and viewed by a human being.

Does a "dashboard" resource make sense in the context of an API? Would it make more sense to instead make that data available in other resources? Is that data available in other resources?

Even if a "meta-resource" aggregating data still makes sense, would it be more logical if the API version had another name, like AccountSummary?

Answer 2

I would create a DashboardsController despite not having Dashboard model. Then to maintain REST principles have a controller method :new and controller method :create. Simply disply the information on the dashboards/new.html.erb but have the form post to the :create controller action.

Answer 3

Yes, basically you want one controller per resource. In this case the resource is a combination of things but since you've identified a singular meta-resource (a "dashboard") it makes sense. So, I'd create a DashboardsController and then have a route like:

resource :dashboard, only: :show

Then you can use dashboard_url for links to the dashboard.

NOTES: The singular resource in the routes file is important because it indicates you don't have a list of resources, just a single one. This means there won't be an index action and the show action will be the default -- thus dashboard_url doesn't require a resource to show to be passed to it. And, regardless, controllers are named in the plural -- thus DashboardsController.