Merge / split controller for UI and API?

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Wed Mar 28 13:55:13 UTC 2012


On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 09:34:58AM +0100, Martyn Taylor wrote:
<snip> 
> I actually think that the /conductor URL should be for the UI only
> and /conductor/api for the API.
> 
> You could argue that the UI is simply a different content-type that
> our RESTful API supports and therefore all requests are the same but
> content-type is changed.  However, I would argue that we treat the UI
> (in html) very differently from other content-types.  The UI has
> server state, i.e. sessions (which are not RESTful) and also it
> doesn't only deal with resources.  It returns a whole other bunch of
> stuff for layout and styling.  This means that resources change
> structure depending on where they are accessed.  They should be
> consistent.

This is an interesting point. But I wonder if the answer might actually
be that we're doing something wrong if our controllers are spending more
time on UI setup than on their core function. Session should just be
used for authentication (and stashing flash messages as a UI
convenience), and the only change in resource structure should occur if
you request that it be displayed a different way -- e.g., XML, HTML
table view, HTML "pretty view", or JSON. You should have the same
information each way, just formatted differently. If this isn't the
case, I think we're doing something fundamentally wrong.

> In addition to this I would recommend keeping the UI and API methods
> separate (but in the same controller) to keep things cleaner.  There
> is a whole bunch of logic that goes towards layout, styling and a
> whole bunch of extra stuff is in there that isn't really relevant (in
> a RESTful API sense).  For example, there's probably multiple
> unrelated resource sets in one page.

But the whole problem is that right now the UI and API methods _are_
separate, and this causes needless duplication and divergent code paths,
where the API and UI methods inevitably do things a little differently
with negative consequences. I would argue that, rather than separating
them out, we should merge them and whip them into shape wherever making
a UI controller method work for API calls isn't trivial.

-- Matt



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