CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrestmodel-view-controller
Alexander Popov
Alexander Popov

Reputation: 24875

How to structure controllers for a model that must be presented in several ways?

Suppose there's a Photos model. For this model I have several views: recent photos, popular photos, favourite photo etc.. How do I go about creating the controller for this model. There are different options:

  1. One PhotosController with an index action. I send a parameter to the index action and based on this parameter the controller makes a query to the DB and returns @photos to the view. This has the disadvantage that the index action will become quite big.

  2. Same as above but logic for deciding what query to make is extracted into a service, so that the controller stays lean.

  3. One PhotosController with several actions recent, popular, favorite etc., but that's not very restful.

  4. Several controllers with index actions - RecentPhotosController, PopularPhotosController etc.. In that case though I must still have a normal PhotosController to hande show, edit actions.

Is there an established best practice for this and what are the considerations when choosing one of those options?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 25

Answers (1)

apneadiving
apneadiving

Reputation: 115511

I would go way 1.

The controller should not grow big: you must create the query out of it from params in a service object.

Something like:

def index 
  @photos = PhotoQuery.new(params).call
  #....
end

class PhotoQuery
  attr_reader :params
  def initialize(params)
    @params = params
  end

  def call
    case params[:type]
    when 'recent' then Photo.recent
    else Photo.all
    end
  end 
end

Upvotes: 2

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