在自定义Rails应用中实现第三方API资源

Question

I am a student studying web development at a prominent bootcamp in the United States. For my capstone project, I have decided to try and build a fairly simple application wherein one authenticated user can send an amount of Bitcoin to another user (I described to my teacher as a bottled tipping platform). While this sounds simple in theory, there are many points at which I am worried about tripping up.

I am building this application with rails, using the Coinbase API . At my school, we have been taught rails with a fairly strict MVC architecture. Herein is where I have found my first problem. Regarding resources, we have essentially been building from scratch; this will mark my first time attempting to implement a third-party API on the back end. I have noticed in the Coinbase documentation that there are multiple clearly defined resources which I would need to use. The most notable resources are users and accounts (I scaffolded accounts as 'profiles', but they serve the same purpose in an ERD).

If I am working with these pre-built resources, do I need to fully scaffold them, or can I simply import them into my files, then custom write the code to my specifications? If so, would it make sense for me to simply rip up my scaffolding and start from scratch? More broadly, how should I go about fitting pre-existing resources into my MVC architecture?

Any help is tremendously appreciated!

Answer 1

Going to use Stripe for an example because their docs are the best:

Inside your Rails app, you have a User model. For the sake of this example, your User has an id , email , and stripe_customer_id

user.rb :

before_create :create_stripe_customer

def create_stripe_customer
  stripe_customer = Stripe::Customer.create(
    :email => "your@email.com",
  ) 
  self.stripe_customer_id = stripe_customer.id
end

def stripe_customer
  @stripe_customer ||= Stripe::Customer.find(self.stripe_customer_id)
end 

Using before_create against an external API is frowned upon ("what if it timeouts or errors?") but for the sake of learning what to do, it's fine.

If you're asking "should I replicate all the data in my own database?" the answer is no; let the API do the work, but cache the results and make sure you don't block your app's requests with external API requests.