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Don't Fear the URLs

adam.blog.heroku.com

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Re: Don't Fear the URLs

#3

Post by jonknee »

That final solution was trash. Decouping can be helpful. For me the biggest is using third-party code. I can have my own URL structure for someone else's app and the views (in Django, aka controllers in Rails) don't change. Having to change every method just to fit into my site structure would be a nightmare. And I don't see a need to tie URLs to my methods, they're not always being called by a URL anyway.

Knowing about available parameters is again not a problem in Django, they are in the method definition. I was pretty sure this was the case with Rails anyway.

And as Chris already mentioned, you can have multiple routes if they are decoupled.

Re: Don't Fear the URLs

#6

Post by ericwaller »

I don't agree with the solution, but he does start off with a good point -- sometimes you have to write a lot of awkward code just to define very simple REST-style resources, whether it's for a public/private api or just some ajax accessible actions for an application.

What's different about the action he describes (and RESTful actions in general) is that the controller essentially gets in the way of accessing the model directly. What he really wants is an rpc call from javascript (or some other internal service), but to do so in the rails paradigm, he has to create a "webpage" which prints out 3.

At the same time though, you might have a resource that requires authentication. If that's the case, the controller has a more obvious role.

Re: Don't Fear the URLs

#9

Post by KevBurnsJr »

The example may be somewhat literal and simplistic, but I feel the idea has merit.

An interesting direction to keep in mind should the controller logic ever begin too smell spagghetified.

Re: Don't Fear the URLs

#10

Post by delano »

chrisbroadfoot wrote: post #2

So, instead of having multiple routes, with this method you're locked into one route per action.

That's not true. Have you looked at Sinatra? It's gorgeous. All URI definitions can (and should) be placed in a single .rb file.

  get '/content/:id' do
    header 'Content-Type' => 'text/html; charset=utf-8'
  
    # Get content using params[:id]
  
    if (!@content.empty?)
      erb :show
    else
      redirect '/'
    end
  end

  get '/newstuff' do
    header 'Content-Type' => 'text/html; charset=utf-8'
    login_required

    # Do stuff

    erb :new, :layout => :layout_admin
  end
 
  post '/newstuff' do
    header 'Content-Type' => 'text/html; charset=utf-8'
    login_required
  
    @summary = Summary.new(
      :date => Time.now, 
      :title => params[:title], 
      :author => params[:author], 
      :worthwhile => params[:worthwhile]
    )
  
    # Save content
  
    erb(:new, :layout => :layout_admin)
  end
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