Search action in ReSTful rails model

Question

So, I'm quite new to Rails and still working my way through the principles. I suppose like most people, I have started creating that basic CRUD. Okay. Done.

Now I want a new action: search. As it turns out, it is not one of the 7 rest sacred (!) actions (if got it right). While I know I could implement new custom actions and resource it and everything, I read in a few places to try my best to stick to the standard ones as long as possible. Okay. What would be the correct way?

Again a few sources like this guy suggest thinking of my scenarios in therms of nouns , case in which seems I'd need a "search" controller...? It just doesn't convince me that I'd have to create a whole class whereas I'd normally do def search just to keep it ResTful.

What did I get wrong? What would be the common solution here?

thanks.

Answer 1

REST is a concept, not a religion :-). But the core verbs are GET/POST/PUT/DELETE which map to their associated HTTP verbs. What's in the URL is typically a reflection of this, and (this is more the Rails philosophy) following convention can make everything much easier. The URLs you get with generic rails (eg scaffold) are not particularly ideal in several ways, but they work, and you can change them.

So, yeah, for search (assuming it's starting simple, eg finding records in a single model, say Product ) then you could do a GET with a query string like this

def search
  @results = Product.where("name ILIKE ?", params[:query])
  ...
end

Which would result in a URL like /product/search?query="foo" -- nothin' wrong with that.

Answer 2

It depends if your search is against ONE resource or many resources. For example if you have a ProductsController and you want to implement a search feature only for your products, you could create a collection action called "search" (the url would be /products/search)

If your search is for many resources, I'd create a SearchesController with a singleton resource :search in my routes file.

Then again, when you implement search functionality in your application, don't put all the logic in your controller but create models classes to handle your search. You can even create an abstract class to map to your search form and thus avoid using '*_tag' fields to create your search form.

See : https://github.com/slainer68/basic_active_model

Answer 3

If you want to adhere to REST (which is a guideline really, it has pros and cons), then the slideshare you link to is recommending the right way to do things.

So, for example if you have a comments_controller, and you want to be able to search comments, you could create a comments_search_controller. The search form would be at comments_search_controller#new, which would POST to comments_search_controller#create.

Yes, you are creating another class doing it this way, but that's not much different than creating another action in the comments_controller, and it does keep things consistent and separated. You wouldn't need a new CommentSearch model or anything, just that controller, which asks your Comment model for the relevant search results.