a couple days ago i started a project- i'm not using restful routes and my whole file looks like this match '/a/b' => 'a#b' over and over. Are these kind of routes considered incorrect or bad?
This is considered bad practice. Instead you should use resource or resources liberally and do your best to follow the seven RESTful actions. Your best bet is to read The Ruby on Rails Routing Guide as it provides many great examples!
It would be great if you could fit your routing into some kind of RESTful action, but if not, at least clump your controllers together in blocks. I doubt all of your controllers will just have a single route? If so, consider Sinatra, unless you are just playing around, then this conversation is pointless. If you are not using this in a real production app, your real question should be "Where do i learn how to use routing effectively"?
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Like most rails folks my restful controllers stick to a very consistent pattern, and any changes are rarely more than an extra line or two.
I like to test (using RSpec) fairly thoroughly, and that includes assigns, responds, redirects etc in controller tests.
The thing is, 75% of my controller specs follow the exact same pattern, and an obvious step seems to be to refactor them into a method/set of methods that I can call from each spec....either with a single (for example) 'restful_controller_specs' call, or individual 'restful_index_specs', 'restful_show_specs' etc for actions if the resource isn't completely standard.
And yet, when looking at other people's projects, from what I can see nobody else really seems to do that.
So in short, am I missing a good reason as to why not to agressively refactor restful controller specs?
I think most rails developers have learned programming by learning rails, which is not the ideal way to learn how to program, so things like refactoring are not a concept they have learned or encountered. Many people don't realise that files like config/routes.rb and db/migrate/* are just ruby code, and you can add loops and arrays and classes and subclasses into them as you need, just like any ruby program.
To all the rails coders out there: learn ruby! learn it well! It's a real programming language! Rails is made entirely of ruby.
in order to better understand how RESTful works in Rails and thus become better at producing such code, i would like to manually create a resource from scratch. I generally know how to setup routes, controllers and the likes, but i would be interested in checking out some tutorial(s) that describe just that in detail.
Do you happen to know of anything ?
I would first advise you to get your REST concepts cleared. In my opinion, REST is fairly misunderstood concept in the community. I would recommend understanding it first without sticking to rails or any other technology for that matter. Ryan Tomayko has written a killer blog post about it. You also might want to read Roy Fielding's paper, if you are into it.
Once you understand the concept clearly, implementing it in a technology is not so hard. For rails, create a blank controller and start adding the actions one by one based on your understanding of REST. Think about exactly are you doing in the action. Are you fetching the data and showing it to the user? In that case, you need to make sure that the action can only be called with a HTTP GET verb. Are you updating a record in that action? You probably should only be accepting a HTTP PUT verb for that action and so on... Here are some resources found on some quick googling which look good to me.
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2008/02/04/restful-rails-part-i/
http://s3.amazonaws.com/ozonesoft.net_public/RESTfulRails.pdf
I would recommend reading the standard documentation of routes in rails. I think that's enough. But to understand what makes an app a RESTful app and what doesn't is the key.
I've been messing about in rails the past 2 months and so far everything's going well - but there's one area I'm a little doubtful on.
I keep hearing about the joys of RESTful rails resources: that is, a 'resource :foo' in config/routes, and your 7 restful actions in the controller.
Except for very simple things (eg stuff that's 99% done by running 'generate scaffold'), I find it's less convenient to try squeeze my project functionality into that approach than to just match urls in config/routes one-by-one and do each action as needed.
But I keep getting the sense that I'm wrong, and that in all but the most extreme circumstances, RESTful resources are the way to go.
So:
(a) Can anyone offer an opinion on this?
(b) For experienced rails folks, what % of your routes in a typical project are :resources and what % are coded action-by-action?
Cheers...
Resources are convenient, but they are not a "one size fits all" feature. Some things just don't make sense with the 7 methods.
Keep in mind that you can:
Exclude specific methods with :except.
Include only specific methods with :only.
Add your own methods to the resource.
So they aren't as inflexible as you may think. But if, after taking those 3 points in mind, the resource just doesn't "feel right", skip it! REST was never meant to replace regular routing, it just tries to abstract away the most common use case.
If you skip out on RESTful resources completely, you'll be missing a ton of free functionality. Use it wisely and you'll be fine.
Generally I start a project with the REST architecture in mind. I build out my basic functionality this way, but as the project/website progresses I write more and more views that do not fit into the RESTful architecture. Marketing sites and parallel functionality are perfect examples of this.
Here is an article on the approach:
http://ablogaboutcode.com/2010/11/22/to-be-or-not-to-be-restful-ruby-on-rails-best-practices/
Before you get started, here are some questions you might want to ask yourself:
Does this controller/view deal primarily with an object/entity like a Post, Blog?
Are create, update, delete, edit and new actions all going to be available on the web?
As a guideline, if you answer YES to these two questions, then it’s probably best to start with REST and expect that you will eventually use the architecture as a building block for additional actions and views you might want to perform. Otherwise, pick a URL that best represents what the action will show or do (/archives, /tour, /december-offer) and make sure you use the proper HTTP Protocols (GET for display, PUT for update, DELETE for removing and POST for creating).
I am pondering on using a Restful implementation in Rails. I'm asking myself if it's the way to go.
Should I always go for a Restful implementation or not?
I think there really isn't much other option as far as Rails goes. You would just be fighting against all the design decisions and sensible defaults that Rails, as a framework, has already made for you.
Think about all the provided shortcuts for routing, pathing, forms, etc. I think you would end up just spending more time/effort on a non-RESTful implementation.
The first thing to sort out is what REST really means. Fundamentally it is about utilizing HTTP efficiently and correctly. That is, GET requests don't modify anything, PUT requests are idempotent, etc. The notion of uniquely identified resources just sort of falls out of this optimal usage of HTTP. The beauty of REST is that you gain the maximum programmatic benefit out of HTTP, making things like caching, proxying, and automatic retrying able to work fairly well without any knowledge of the application whatsoever. Dare Obasanjo wrote a nice rant on the topic of REST misunderstanding. This contrasts heavily to something like SOAP where you have an heavyweight envelope format that uses HTTP as nothing more than a glorified transport layer.
Now when it comes to Rails REST there is a whole nother thing going on, and that is Rails' convention over configuration. Rails REST is just a thin baked-in layer of tooling to make it easy to define CRUD operations on resources you define. Note that these resources don't need to correspond to ActiveRecord models, and certainly using Rails resource routing is not a pre-requisite for designing a RESTful application. What Rails gives you is an extremely handy default for dealing with things that fit the model of a CRUDable resource, however you shouldn't hesitate to define additional methods on top of resources, or to forego resources altogether if you have pages that don't really seem like resources (eg. reports).
The bottom line to keep in mind is that it's not one or the other. Rails RESTful helpers are using the same primitives that have always been in Rails. You can use both together and they jive nicely.
I've been learning Rails but routes continues to confuse the heck out of me.
The thing that makes it most confusing, I think, is that the routes you define are sensitive to where they are defined in your routes.rb file relative to other routes.
Has anyone come across a nice simple guide that sums things up well?
The first hit on Google for "Rails routes guide" is Rails Routing from the Outside In, which is quite comprehensive.
If you're okay with spending money on a dead tree reference, The Rails Way is actually worth it. The guides posted are probably your best bet this time, but if you plan on doing a lot of Rails, this book really breaks it down and makes it understandable. It's been a tremendous help for me. Good Luck.
As a side remark:
The routes at the beginning take preference over the routes later in the file.
So whenever you want to specify some kind of catchall route (like the default routes that map every action in every controller) you need to do that at the end.
One thing to note when you are learning and experimenting with rails routes is that there is a way to see what rails is actually doing with your config/routes.rb file.
$rake routes
this will return all of the routes it has setup based upon your config/routes.rb file. This has been particularly helpful for me as I have learned about how all of the route variables names are setup, such as new_model1_model2_path(#model1).
http://guides.rubyonrails.org is a fantastic reference, and I found their guide on routing to be extremely helpful!
I just used the one at rubyonrails.org. With all the links, it's a good one..