Rails Nested Resource Issues

Dmitri Dolguikh dmitri at redhat.com
Fri Sep 21 10:16:05 UTC 2012


On 20/09/12 01:20 PM, Martyn Taylor wrote:
> Gents.
>
> I'm having some trouble with getting nested resources working properly 
> from bespoke XML/JSON in RESTful API.  There seems to be some 
> fundamental problems with the way rails works, which means we have to 
> write a lot of bespoke code to get it working, possibly even having to 
> monkey patch Rails itself.
>
> I've written an example rails app that highlights the problem and put 
> a detailed description in the README you can find it here:
>
> https://github.com/mtaylor/Rails-Nested-Resource-Issues
>
> I've ran into this issue on IME.  But it's going to affect us across 
> all rails projects with REST APIs, so we could do with discussing this 
> issue and coming up with the best possible solution that results in as 
> little replication as possible.
>
> Please read through the problem and let me know if you have any better 
> ideas that the solutions I have proposed.
>
> Regards
>
> Martyn

I think the reason for the somewhat odd approach chosen for 
'accepts_nested_attributes_for' is, at least in part, due to 
complexities involved in turning of the attribute setter into a factory 
method. Not only this is messy, but also introduces side-effects, and 
genuine 'WTH' moments.

The solution that we have works quite well for web-ui's, but not so much 
for API's.

Having said that, I'll side with Jir(í that the least invasive/offensive 
solution is to do necessary transformations in the controller. I think I 
like the idea of not creating nested resources at all through API, 
especially if they are first-class ones (as opposed to embedded-only ones).

-d
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