>> 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
I was not arguing against merging the controllers. What I am saying
is that the UI and the API are separate entities. If you want to
serve them both from the same controllers then fair enough that makes
sense. Helper methods can be written shared by both UI and API
etc... However, what I want to avoid is one massive method that
mixes the UI and API functionality. What I was more envisaging the
API methods to offer a native ruby content type. That the UI methods
can use. For example:
@image = Image.all
when format.xml?
return @images.xml
when format.json
return @images.sjon
else
return @image
end
This way the UI methods can use the API methods in local method calls
and then add whatever extra stuff it needs in order to make the
service usable by a user+browser.
regards
Martyn
I'm intrigued by this idea and don't think its a bad idea to explore
this further.
I think alot of the question comes down to at what level is the API
satisfied. Currently it's being done at the controller layer in an 'api'
namespace, but going along w/ your example I think its best the push
this and as much else down to the service layer.
This way the service layer can be used outside the scope of the web
interface in a locally consumable manner. Perhaps this layer can also be
moved into its own gem so that the end user doesn't need to pull in
rails to use Conductor.
Makes sense? Would this approach work?
-Mo