Ruby on Rails - Duplicate routes & impact on controllers - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am creating a Task Manager.
So, I have:
A dashboard where I can do CRUD for tasks (and then I will assign them a group)
A group section where I can go inside a group and do CRUD for tasks
Then my routes would look something like this:
Rails.application.routes.draw do
devise_for :users
namespace :api, defaults: { format: :json } do
namespace :v1 do
resources :groups, only: [ :index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy] do
member do
resources :tasks, only: [:index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy]
end
end
resources :tasks, only: [:index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy]
end
end
end
For this:
A dashboard where I can do CRUD for tasks (and then I will assign them a group)
resources :tasks, only: [:index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy]
And for this:
A group section where I can go inside a group and do CRUD for tasks
resources :groups, only: [ :index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy] do
member do
resources :tasks, only: [:index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy]
end
end
But I feel this is duplicating routes. I have 2 questions:
Is this the right approach or would there be a better way to solve it?
If I go with this, how would I approach the controller actions? Since in one situation (2) we would get the params[:group_id] but in the other I would need to add it as strong_params. Would an if-else condition work? (if there is no [:group_id] in strong_params then take the params[:group_id])
Thanks!

Answer 1

Is this the right approach or would there be a better way to solve it?
No. Not really.
Deeply nested routes quickly become cumbersome to work with so you should consider using shallow nesting. This only nests the collection routes (index, new, create) and not the member routes (show, edit, update, destroy).
If tasks have a unique id you should be able to show, edit, update and destroy them without the group being involved. The exception to this rule is if tasks are only unique per group (but why?).
In an API this is especially true. The backend shouldn't need to know that you're modifying the resource from page X or Y in your frontend application.
You can use the shallow: true option to generate shallow routes but I would probally just define it as:
# This respresents tasks not nested in a group
resources :tasks, only: [:index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy]
resources :groups, only: [:index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy] do
resources :tasks, only: [:index, :create]
end
If I go with this, how would I approach the controller actions?
There are really two different approaches here. One I call the "param sniffing method":
module API
module V1
class TasksController
# GET /api/v1/groups/1/tasks
# GET /api/v1/tasks
def index
if params[:group_id]
render json: Group.find(params[:group_id]).tasks
else
render json: Task.all
end
end
end
end
end
This is the most obvious solution but blatantly violates the Single Responsibity Principle and increases the cyclic complexity of all the methods.
The other solution is to route the nested representation of the resource to a separate controller:
# This respresents tasks not nested in a group
resources :tasks, only: [:index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy]
resources :groups, only: [ :index, :show, :create, :update, :destroy] do
resources :tasks, only: [:index, :create], module: :groups
end
This routes the /groups/:group_id/tasks routes into API::V1::Groups::TasksController.
module API
module V1
class TasksController
# GET /api/v1/tasks
def index
render json: Task.all
end
end
end
end
module API
module V1
module Groups
class TasksController
before_action :set_group
# GET /api/v1/groups/1/tasks
def index
render json: #group.tasks
end
private
def set_group
#group = Group.find(params[:group_id])
end
end
end
end
end
You could also just do resources :tasks, only: [:index, :create], controller: :group_tasks if you want to avoid nesting the contants one more step.