RESTful Routing Basics

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RESTful Routing Basics

• RoR Meetup, 1/18/2007
• Andre Lewis

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What Youll Learn

• Getting started with RESTful resources in Rails
  1.2
• Using scaffold_resource
• How to nest resources

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Motivation

• Why care about REST?
• What can REST do for you?

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• Fewer decisions to make
• More easily understand others work, or your own
  older work
• Nice URLs
• Convenient named routes
• XML/JS/JSON responses, easier

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The REST Mindset

• Think in terms of
• Create ? GET /items/new
• Retrieve ? GET /items/1
• Update ? PUT /items/1
• Delete ? PUT /items/1delete
• Let the constraints imposed by CRUD guide your
  controller design

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Lets code a Nested Resource
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Review Nested Resources

• Create the resource scaffolding and migrations
• Set up relationships in models
• Modify routes.rb
• Modify the controller of the nested resource
• add a before_filter
• amend the _url calls in create and update
  actions
• scope your Comment (nested class) finders to the
  Post (nestee class)
• Modify the views
• Provide a link to the nested resource

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REST Learn More

• My blog post at http//earthcode.com
• DHH's REST keynote (get the slides too!)
• http//www.loudthinking.com/lt-files/worldofresour
  ces.pdf
• http//www.scribemedia.org/2006/07/09/dhh/
• The 2nd edition of Pragmatic's Agile Web
  Development
• Peepcode screencast and cheatsheet

Questions/Feedback?

• what about optionally nested resources?
• What about the new/edit request.get? pattern?
• Is it bad to put additional methods on your
  RESTful controllers?

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My Info