Rails 3 - session's and routing!

Question

I am building a web app which has multiple projects. The general data model is such that each project has many resources such as documents, registers, etc.Something along the lines of:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :documents, :registers, :employments
  has_many :users, :through => :employments

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :employments
  has_many :projects, :through => :employments

class Document < ActiveRecord::Base
 belongs_to :project

class Register < ActiveRecord::Base
 belongs_to : project

The difficulty comes with routing!! Any C UD actions to projects will be done through a namespace. However, when a user is viewing a project, i want the project_id in the routes such that:

'0.0.0.0:3000/:project_id/documents/

OR

'0.0.0.0:3000/:project_id/register/1/new

I thought about something like:

match '/:project_id/:controller/:id'

I presume I am to store the project_id in a session? If i forgo these routes for something simplier such as just:

"0.0.0.0:3000/documents"

How do I then bind any CRUD actions to documents or registers to the current project?? Surely I don't have to hard wire this into every controller?

HELP!

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 01 '11 at 19:09

I guess what you need are nested resources.

resources :projects do
  resources :documents
  resources :registers
end

Now you'll get routing like this:

/projects/:project_id/documents
/projects/:project_id/registers

You'll be able to call params[:project_id] inside the DocumentsController and RegistersController. You won't need a session to store the project_id. This will be available to you inside the url. You should avoid sessions as much as possible when creating a RESTful application.

The only extra thing you need to do is setting the relationship inside the create action of both Controllers:

def create
  @document = Document.new(params[:document])
  @document.project_id = params[:project_id]
  # Now you save the document.
end

What I like to do is creating a helper method inside the ApplicationController that gets the current project.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  helper_method :current_project

  private

  def current_project
    @current_project ||= Project.find(params[:project_id]) if params[:project_id].present?
  end
end

Now you can do the following inside the create action:

def create
  @document = Document.new(params[:document])
  @document.project = current_project
  # Now you save the document.
end

You'll also be able to call current_project inside your views for registers and documents. Hope that helps you out!

Check the Ruby on Rails guide for some more information on nested resources: http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#nested-resources

That sounds good - I had started to work towards a solution using sessions but now I am starting to seriously second guess. To avoid heavy nested I presume I'm then meant to start shallow nesting my resources? ie. for document revisions, document types etc. — Peter Murray, Feb 03 '11 at 12:20
Yeah you shouldn't overdo nested routing. It just becomes harder and harder to create your routes. When you want to nest something under the documents you already know which project it belongs to via de document. So it's not needed to further nest it inside your routing. You can do it however. It's your choice. Just try to stay away from sesssions for these type of problems. ;) — RobinBrouwer, Feb 03 '11 at 13:35

Rails 3 - session's and routing!

1 Answers1