Namespace an admin area - ruby-on-rails

Question

As an example, lets say I'm creating a twitter(-ish) clone.
A User has_many Tweets
A Tweet belongs to a User
Users can create tweets
Users can edit and delete their own tweets
Users who are admins can edit and delete all tweets
Users who are admins can edit and delete users who aren't admins
Here's my tweets controller:
class TweetsController < ActionController
before_action :set_tweet, only: [:edit, :update, :destroy]
before_action :only_admins_and_owner, only: [:edit, :update, :destroy]
def edit
# edits the tweet
end
def update
# updates the tweet
end
def destroy
# destroys the tweet
end
private
### security
def only_admins_and_owner
redirect_to root_url unless current_user.is_admin? || current_user === #tweet.user
end
###
def set_tweet
#tweet = Tweet.find(params[:id])
end
end
My users controller:
class UsersController < ActionController
before_action :set_user, only: [:edit, :update, :destroy]
before_action :only_admins_and_user, only: [:edit, :update, :destroy]
def edit
# edits the user
end
def update
# updates the user
end
def destroy
# destroys the user
end
private
### security
def only_admins_and_user
redirect_to root_url unless current_user.is_admin? || current_user === #user
end
###
def set_user
#user = User.find(params[:id])
end
end
And here's my panels controller. Not sure if this is the right way to do it to be honest. What do you think of my naming conventions? I haven't called it AdminController because by panels (plural) I am refering to the multiple panels in the admin area, the user panel (for displaying all of the users and offering administration controls in the view) and the tweets panel:
class PanelsController < ActionController
before_action :only_admins
def users
#users = User.all
end
def tweets
#tweets = Tweet.all
end
private
### security
def only_admins
redirect_to root_url unless current_user.is_admin?
end
###
end
If you think this controller setup is okay, how should I configure my routes to use these actions?
My routes file:
MyApp::Application.routes.draw do
resources :users, except: [:index] do
resources :tweets, except: [:index]
end
end
Now the above works okay if I am a normal user CRUDing away at user and tweets but how should I namespace my Panels controller?
When an admin is viewing users in the panels controller's users view, I want the URLs to look like this:
/control_panel/users
/control_panel/tweets
and when editing in the admin area:
/control_panel/users/12/edit
/control_panel/users/12/tweets/142/edit
but when a user is editing their own user or tweet:
/users/12/edit
/users/12/tweets/142/edit
This is because the panels administration views are vastly different to the user views, but the functionality of editing, updating and deleting is identical so I want to use the already existing actions. Am I doing it right? Not sure how else I could do it, other than adding loads of actions to to the panels controller, def_user_update and def_tweet_update and so on for every single resource. Doesn't feel very nice...
So how should I configure my routes?
I guess I want to sort of create an optional namespace around my two nested routes...
Maybe a concern? If I do that, though, I get an uninitialized constant Panel error.

Answer 1

If you want to use the same controller, which is something I don't really recommend, you can use a scope.
resources :users, except: [:index] do
resources :tweets, except: [:index]
end
scope :control_panel do
resources :users, expect: [:index] do
resources :tweets, except: [:index]
end
end
This gets you all the routes that you want, and they all point to the UsersController and TweetsController
What I recommend instead is using a different controller for admins. You can achieve this with namespaces.
namespace :control_panel do
resources :users, etc: ...
end
You then keep site user's concerns in TweetsController and control panel concerns in ControlPanel::TweetsController in app/controllers/control_panel/tweets_controller.rb
You can read more about namespaces and routing here.