I would like to have a Referral model, where user A can refer an Event X to user B. The way I plan to implement it is without Referral Views. I just have a Refer button on a events/show page for create action, and have referred users in users/show page for show. I don't see the need to create a view for referral.
From design pattern point of view, is it OK to create "refer" action in Events_Controller to invoke create method in Referral model, instead of sending it to a designated controller (i.e., Refferals_Controller), which will make call to Referral model?
More generally, should I create controller to allow other controllers to interact with my model, even if I don't need any views for this particular model?
Thank you.
Controller is where the http requests come (after passing through Routing). No incoming requests == no controller. Good when controller complies with REST scheme (index, show, create ...). But you can add non-REST actions as well (Rails Routing supports this: 3 Non-Resourceful Routes)
All interaction with model should probably go in the model class.(Edit: I mean code)
You shouldn't create a controller to just forward calls to model from other controllers. You can have several models per controller. Or several controllers per model.
Sometimes (if you know what you're doing) you can even call model methods from the view directly ("some rules can be bent, some can be broken" (c) Morpheus ).
Related
in my rails app I need to generate a bunch of buttons/links linked to several models to enable users to run some maintenance tasks (coded in the Backend).
I found the concept of actions in rails admin here: https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin/wiki/Actions, but I'm not quite clear how to use it, any ideas?
I thought I could add the buttons to the edit action for a model, but no ideas how to.
Sooo, rails uses an MVC paradigm. It sounds like you have the View and Model components under control, but you are missing your Controller logic. The Controller, is a place that handles any View logic using Model methods... ideally.
So, if you already have an existing controller that you are trying to add "Controller Actions" to... you need to define your custom method actions you want to create in your config/routes.rb file.
This will look like the following:
Create a route for your new controller action.
Add new controller action definition to your Controller.
Call controller action in your view's button link_to tag helper
Handle your custom logic in your new controller action using model methods
This is the cyclical MVC nature of Rails. M (Model), V (View), C (Controller).
I can create method in a controller and add routes for it. After that I'll be able to use it like that <%= link_to "+", upvote_item_path(i) %>, but now my methods are in the model.
How can I use them?
Should I create *.js.erb and write a function which runs by the button with onclick or there is another way?
I can create method in a controller and add routes for it
That is exactly how you invoke methods on your models. Your app needs to provide a route, controller and action which invokes methods on your models on behalf of the user.
Buttons and links have absolutely no direct access to your model layer. Your model layer and the client can never communicate directly. The client submits requests, which are routed to an action on a controller, and that action may manipulate your models in some way, and then render a result. Trying to allow clients to invoke methods on your model layer without going through an action is absolutely incorrect, and not at all supported by Rails.
How do I associate a PartialView which will be used across the app with a Child Action? For example the PartialView could be a login bar at the top of the page which will need to have some associated logic (loading the model etc) which I would normally put in a ChildAction.
However, I don't know what Controller will be used. I think I could create a base Controller class with the ChildAction and then inherit from that but I was hoping there would be a more elegant solution.
The RenderAction method allows for selecting the controller:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee839451.aspx
I am trying to come up with a clean design for this -
I am using MVC to process orders, so I have an 'order' entity, with its own controller and views.
From the Create Order view I would like the user to add a 'Customer' entity. I have a controller and CRUD operations for 'customer'.
When someone creates a new Order I would like them to either
1) enter a customer name to see if that customer already exists, and if so, add that Customer to the Order, or
2) Create a new Customer then add that new Customer to the Order.
My problem is I am not sure of a good way to access the Customers from within the Order.
-do I create a partial view for Create Customer, then use that view in the Customer Create AND Order Create?
-then would I create a partial view 'SearchCustomers' that passes params to an action on Customer controller and that returns results? Would I be able to reuse this across the site?
You can see I am not sure about a few things - are partial views the way to reuse things? can partial views be reused across controllers and access different controllers from the ones theyre in?
I have gone through an MVC book and online tutorials but they all seem to use beginner examples, where Model objects don't contain other Model objects.
Thanks for help
Views never "access controllers".
The flow is:
Controller Action Method -> Creates View Model -> Hands it off to a View -> View displays it -> View can pass sub-models on to other partial views
Decomposing everything into smaller models and partial views (or using Editor templates) is a good approach. You can then assemble those smaller models into a larger view model for a complete page, or you can use the ViewBag to assemble them in a non-strongly typed manner.
In my Rails controller I want to branch to a different controller's action, show its view and then return back to my original action, i.e. it's not a simple redirect, more like a sub-procedure call.
I want to use this whenever a user does something suspicious, like editing a post too often in a row. I still want to allow the edit, but first the user has to answer some CAPTCHA-like questions on a different page. (Similar to Authlogic-oid, where during validation the user is redirected to the OpenID provider's page)
You can push the current request into the Session, then do a redirect to the captcha, then have the captcha action look into the Session to check where it should redirect to.
IIRC, Autlogic does exactly that with redirect_back_or_default.
You can't.
Convert the common stuff into a helper method and then both the controllers should call this method.
It's possible to create an instance of the other controller and call methods on it, but you should probably reevaluate your organization first (look into helpers, modules, etc.)
#my_other_controller = MyOtherController.new
#my_other_controller.some_method(params[:id])