何时/如何使用嵌套资源

Question

I have a rails app. Users can create products that will be listed on products index page (including some data about the user who posted it) and everybody can see the list on app/products.html .

What is the best way to implement this? Should I do it with nested resources (user has many products) in which case I can use product.user.name for displaying the user name or should I create an independent class so when user creates a product, some user attributes (name, etc.) will get saved in the product table.

Answer 1

Your mixing together quite a few different concepts here.

Nested routes

In REST you have a concept of nested resources which is expressed though URIs such as:

posts/:post_id/comments # comment that belong to a resource.

Which tells us that there is a "has many" relation between post and comments .

The best practice here is that:

• Don't nest if you don't need to.
• Never nest more than 1 level deep. posts/:post_id/comments/:comment_id/replies for example should be comments/:comment_id/replies .

Associations and domain modeling

Domain modeling on the other hand is how your models fit together. In ActiveRecord each model class is backed by a database table.

Each model should correspond to a single type of object in your problem domain. So in your case you would have a User class and Products class.

They would be linked by a products.user_id column. So no - you should not store users attributes in the products table.