I want to implement tags in my Rails application but I'm having trouble with one specific feature of that implementation. You see I want to make it possible for users to specify multiple tags in the url scheme, something like http://domain/tags/:id1/:id2/.... Has anyone implemented something like this in Rails or know how to do it?
You want something called "Route Globbing":
match 'tags/*tag_ids' => 'tags#lots_of_tags'
Then in lots_of_tags action you'd have params[:tag_ids] array of provided tag ids or a string in form of id1/id2 (not sure which one, you should test it by yourself).
More info on this in rails guides:
Related
I'm a Rails noob, but I'd like to use it as a backend for an Ember application with Ember Data. Unfortunately, I have some unknown unknowns.
The RESTAdapter documentation says:
Comments for a post can be loaded by post.get('comments'). The REST
adapter will send a GET request to /comments?ids[]=1&ids[]=2&ids[]=3.
It will generate similar urls if you use something like App.Post.find({title: "Some Title"}), in about the format you'd expect: /posts?title=Some+Title
Is there some option, or gem I can use to handle that sort of simple query, or do I have to go parse parameters in my controllers manually?
To clarify, I'm aware that I can tell my Rails controller to return a set like:
#comments = Comment.find(params[:ids])
respond_with(#comments)
But it seems like querying on ids or accessible attributes like that would be a common enough use case for REST APIs that something would be built in, or have a gem written to handle it.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thanks.
This might be helpful in your case:
https://github.com/ernie/ransack/
Or
https://github.com/ernie/squeel
How has Github managed to get friendly URLs for representing repos of users? For a project called abc by username foo, how do they work around with a URL like: http://github.com/foo/abc. Are they fetching the abc model for the DB from the title in the URL (which sounds unreasonable as they are modifying the titles). How are they transferring the unique ID of the abc repo which they can fetch and show in the view?
The reason I ask is that I am facing a similar problem of creating friendlier URLs to view a resource. MongoDB's object IDs are quite long and make the URL look horrific. Is there a workaround? All the tutorials that demonstrate CRUD (or REST) URLs for a resource always include the object's unique ID(e.g. http://mysite.org/post/1 or http://mysite.org/post/1/edit. Is there a better way to do it?
Not having seen their code, I couldn't tell you exactly how they do it, but if you're using Rails there are at least two Ruby gems that will give you similar results:
Take a look at Slugged and friendly_id
http://github.com/foo/abc is a unique repository identifier (for that repo's master branch). I'd assume that somewhere they have a table that looks like:
repository-id | user-id | project-id
and are just looking up based on user and project rather than repository-id.
You'd need to do some domain-specific mapping between internal and user-friendly ids, but you'd need to make sure that was a 1:1 mapping.
See this rails cast on methods, gems and solutions to common problems you might get while modifying the application to use friendly urls.
http://railscasts.com/episodes/314-pretty-urls-with-friendlyid?view=asciicast
(although Ryan Bates deserves the rep+ for this)
I mocked a structure like this using FriendlyID and Nested Resources.
Essentially, use friendly ID to get the to_param-ish slugs in your routes, then set up nested resources. Using GitHub as an example:
routes.rb
resources :users do
resources :repositories
end
Then in your controller, say, for repositories, you can check the existence of params[:user_id] and use that to determine the user from the route. The reason I check for existence is because I did something like (roughly):
/myrepositories/:repository_id
/:user_id/:repository_id
So my controller does:
def show
#user = params[:user_id] ? User.find(params[:user_id]) : current_user
end
I followed this tutorial here to get started with this same project.
This is called URL rewriting if the web server does it (such as Apache), and routing when it happens in a web application framework (such as Ruby on Rails).
http://www.sinatrarb.com/intro#Routes
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
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.
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 (e.g. 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, e.g. 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.
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
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.
I am trying to make some clean URLs in a Rails3 application I am working on... but I am having a hard time understanding how to (or if I even should) customise my routes to make this work.
Here is the example:
I have a list of Stores. Each store is in a category (health, sports etc). Each store has a location.
I have 2 ways I'd like to present the data. One display is a list of all the stores in a directory type structure, the other is on a map.
Ideally I'd like my URLs to work something like this:
/stores/health/map (or /stores/map/health) to show just the health stores on a map (where essentially the map parameter is effecting which view is displayed, but still using the Index controller... which using a collection in my route doesn't seem to suit)
The other URL I'd like is /stores/sports/ to show just the sports stores in a directory view (the default) for example...
I am not entirely clear how I can manipulate the routes to handle this...
Here is my current Route which isn't really doing it for me:
resources :stores do
collection do
get 'map'
end
end
On top of that, I'd like to be able to add filters without using ?query=params... so:
/stores/sports/hockey , would essentially filter out only hockey stores...
I have no issues doing this with ?query, it's just putting my params into a nicer URL that I'm trying to achieve.
The documentation does not seem to outline what I am trying to do, so Im assuming what Im trying to do is wrong.
Is this breaking REST? Am I looking at it all backwards?
Thanks for your help, JD
You might be overthinking this. :-)
If you want to route HTTP Get of 'stores/health/map' to the StoresController with an action name of, say, health_map, what you need to do is:
get 'stores/health/map' => 'stores#health_map'
Anything that is a clean URL and doesn't modify data and uses HTTP GET is RESTful. (And that is coming from a co-author of a book on REST). It is when you wish to modify data that you need to be more careful on how you use methods.
To do filtering, try something like:
get '/stores/sports/:filter' => 'stores#sports'
The value of the filter will come into your method as params[:filter]
I am new to RoR and started working on a typical 'has_many' association (ie. a user has many friends). I have everything working correctly, but I don't like having the ids exposed in the url. I find that I need to add extra validation in my controller to make sure the ids represent valid associations in case the user manually entered different ids.
Personally I would like to see the ids out of the url and passed via some other means but that is not always possible. Shallow nesting of resources will help reduce the number of ids I need to validate at least.
What is the RoR philosophy on this? I have not seen anything specific to this issue.
Thanks
the URL has parameters if it is a GET url.
Try using POST parameters, which means your url will no longer be cluttered. Note that a malicious user can still send a made-up POST request using curl.
My approach to this is implementing proper authorization. If the user requests information for an object he is not permitted to read, this should be handled by an authorization framework.
With CanCan or Declarative Authorization you can define rules that replace your "manual" (and error-prone) checks in controllers.
I like the IDs being in the URL. That is what REST is about. Getting information for specific Resources, which have to be identified with an ID.
You can use Friendly ID in order to replace the integer ID by a slug (e.g. users/tollbooth instead of users/42).
basically ror routes by default takes id as key to generate urls. If you are not fan of id based urls then you can always override urls by using to_param inside model.
def to_param
# make sure this field is always present & unique
username
end
then by default you will start seeing username instead of id inside urls
How to find object inside controller actions
User.find_by_username(params[:id])
If you dont want to do this manually make use of slug gems like friendly id