RESTful会员

Question

I am currentlly trying to design a RESTful MembershipsController. The controller action update is used only for promoting, banning, approving,... members. To invoke the update action the URL must contain a Parameter called type with the appropriate value. I am not too sure if that is really RESTful design. Should I rather introduce sepearate actions for promoting,... members?

class MembershipsController < ApplicationController
 def update
    @membership= Membership.find params[:id]
    if Membership.aasm_events.keys.include?(params[:type].to_sym) #[:ban, :promote,...]     
      @membership.send("#{params[:type]}!")
      render :partial => 'update_membership'
    end
  end
end

Answer 1

Neither. The only "actions" a controller should handle are GET, PUT, POST, DELETE (+other http verbs). I realize posting this on a question tagged with "rails" is heresy but today I don't care.

One RESTful way to do this is to create new "processing resources" for each of these operations and POST the member to that resource to invoke the action.

When I say create a new resource, you can interpret that to mean, create a new controller.

Answer 2

To me this is one of the cases when you just shouldn't pull your hair out in efforts to adhere to REST conventions. Your model doesn't seem to fit in with the traditional CRUD concept, and the RESTful principle of differentiating actions via HTTP verbs doesn't seem to belong here too.

If I were you, I would split that action into separate actions for what you need to do with your memberships (trying to stay as DRY as possible). That would make the controller code more readable. And by creating some routes I would also make the view code cleaner ( promote_membership_path , etc.). But that's just me :), so see what fits most for you.

EDIT:

here is an article which explains my point of view a bit: http://www.therailsway.com/2009/6/22/taking-things-too-far-rest

Answer 3

Well, there is more than one way to do things. The questions you should be asking yourself, is how many states are there? How often do new states get added? Etc.

If there wouldn't be that many states, I would create separate actions + a before filter for the find, but I think this is more of a personal preference. If you really want to keep it short, you can put each method on one line. So:

class MembershipsController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :find_membership

  def ban;     @membership.ban!;     render :partial => 'update_membership' end
  def promote; @membership.promote!; render :partial => 'update_membership' end

  protected

  def find_membership
    @membership = Membership.find(params[:id)
  end
end

To answer your question whether it is RESTful: yes, your update method is perfectly RESTful, but remember that a PUT should be idempotent. So if I execute the same method twice, is the result the same? ie what happens if I ban a user and ban him again?