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Inherited Resources is a gem/plugin that allows you to speed up development by making your controllers inherit all restful actions so you just have to focus on what is important. A Rails scaffold controller which responds to html, xml and json is as simple as:
1 2 3 | class ProjectsController < InheritedResources::Base respond_to :html, :xml, :json end |
However all actions are still customizable! For example, you can change the behavior of the create action on success just doing:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | class ProjectsController < InheritedResouces::Base respond_to :html, :xml, :json def create create! do |success, failure| success.html { redirect_to edit_project_url(@project) } end end end |
It also supports I18n (all flash messages are set with I18n), belongs to association (like a task belongs to project), nested belongs to (task belongs to project which belongs to company), polymorphic belongs to (comments belong to task or file or message) and optional belongs to (the same as previously, but you can request the resource with or without parents).
As you noticed, besides simplifying your controllers, InheritedResouces makes easy to reproduce your models behavior and relationship in controllers. And right now, it’s also scopes and responder fluent!
has_scope: named_scope twin brother
Let’s suppose that we have a ProjectsController and at some point you want to add some filters on the index action like showing just featured projects, selecting projects by methodology or even let the user choose how many projects he can see per page. The first thing to do? Add named scopes to your model:
1 2 3 4 5 | class Project < ActiveRecord::Base named_scope :featured, :conditions => { :featured => true } named_scope :by_methodology, proc {|methodology| { :conditions => { :methodology => methodology } } } named_scope :limit, proc{|limit| :limit => limit.to_i } end |
The next step would be to add a lot of code in your controllers that check which named scopes you should call, based on the parameters sent right? Well, not anymore. Your controller can be as simple as:
1 2 3 4 5 | class ProjectsController < InheritedResources::Base has_scope :featured, :boolean => true has_scope :by_methodology has_scope :limit, :default => 10, :only => :index end |
Then for each request:
/projects #=> acts like a normal request, but returning only 10 projects /projects?featured=true #=> calls the featured named scope and bring 10 featured projects /projects?featured=true&by_methodology=agile&limit=20 #=> brings 20 featured projects with methodology agile
If you configure your routes, you could even have pretty urls with it:
/projects/agile/featured #=> brings 10 featured projects with methodology agile
Yay!
Responder
A couple weeks ago, we wrote about ActionController::Responder. But you don’t have to wait Rails 3 to be released to play with it, you can start now by using Inherited Resources.
Quick redirect
After using Inherited Resouces, I realized that most of the times I overwrite a create, update or destroy actions is to change the redirect destination. In our ProjectsController above, if we want to redirect to the edit page after create, we would have to do:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | class ProjectsController < InheritedResouces::Base respond_to :html, :xml, :json def create create! do |success, failure| success.html { redirect_to edit_project_url(@project) } end end end |
It wouldn’t be cool if it have a shortcut? Now it has:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | class ProjectsController < InheritedResouces::Base respond_to :html, :xml, :json def create create! { edit_project_url(@project) } end end |
That simple, just give the url as a proc and since the proc does not expect any parameters, it assumes that you want to overwrite the redirect url.
Finally some DSL?
Last weeks, there was a discussion on Boston.rb group about different resource controllers gems. Reading some of the feedback there, I’ve decided to stab a DSL to Inherited Resources. It will mainly remove the duplication when you have to give a block, the previous example above could be written as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | class ProjectsController < InheritedResouces::Base respond_to :html, :xml, :json create! do |success, failure| success.html { redirect_to edit_project_url(@project) } end end |
Or even in the compact form:
1 2 3 4 | class ProjectsController < InheritedResouces::Base respond_to :html, :xml, :json create! { redirect_to edit_project_url(@project) } end |
Those changes were not applied yet, it depends mainly on you. If you like or not, let us know in the comments!
Tags: inherited_resources, plugins, rails
This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 11:08 am and is filed under English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Great features!
has_scope and responder would be a wonderful help!
About the DSL … IMHO, i couldn’t use.
Success!
That’s just awesome !
I want all of it, even if the DSL part looks less interresting to me than the rest.
Looks nice! Will try it. I have a project that could use right now the feature
It looks very pretty, I liked it a lot!!
Mainly the integration between the controlers and the models
That’s some awesome work, thanks José!
Would it be too difficult to make has_scope calls accept an :as parameter? For cases when you prefer to code in english but expose to the user in another language. Something like this:
has_scope :by_methodology, :as => ‘por_metodologia’, :boolean => true
Or:
has_scope :by_methodology => ‘por_metodologia’, :boolean => true
Looks great! I will certainly take a look at it. Two questions though: Can you alter certain behavior globally? I remember that being a pain in the ass to do with other gems (but that was almost a year ago). And do you have a neat trick on how to test the results? Maybe in combination with Remarkable?
Awesome! Thanks!!
@Ivan there is already an options called :key that does what you suggested. But :as is definitely a better name! I’m going to change that!
@iain Whenever I’m using Inherited Resources, I do not write controller specs, just integration ones (unless a controller does not follow IR pattern). So I test such behavior just in integration specs!
+1 for the DSL. It looks like a nice step towards even more declarative power.
+1 for the DSL, very well put together, can’t wait to give it a try!
Has scope seems pretty phenomenal. I’m not using inherited resources but am definitely going to have to track down how you’re implementing that.
Jose,
Great job on the has_scope. Is this actually looking for a named_scope or would it work also for a method defined on the class?
@malkomalko it also works for methods defined on the class!
Great!
Looks great. I have a question though.
Is inhering from InheritedResource::Base just a transition thing while we’re waiting for Rails 3?
@Rasmus, what do you mean?
Inherited Resources is a plugin and there is no plan to be merged with Rails 3. So that means you still need to inherit from InheritedResources::Base.
José,
Thank you for the clarification. I somehow managed to misunderstand that this was a plugin. May I suggest that you write that InheritedResources is a plugin, in the section called “First, what is Inherited Resources?” so that slow people like me understand faster
Also, reading through the source of the plugin I realized it contains a version of ActionController::Responder. This led me to understand how (and why) the plugin functions with both Rails 2 and 3.
Thanks Rasmus! Already updated the post!
[...] Inherited Resources is scopes and responder fluent | Plataforma Blog [...]
Very cool. I am going to use this with all my projects.
I am having an issue unrelated to has_scope and responder.
I am using the begin_of_association_chain method to set the current_user and current_domain. It works for a single resource but once I start nesting them it fails to set the domain_id or user_id. I am currently overriding all the update and create actions to add the domain_id and user_id in? Am I missing something?
@Aaron, I need to see some code in order to reply you.
http://pastie.org/622499
Aaron, looking to the code at the pastie, the begin of association chain can only set the @current_user OR the @current_domain. So you don’t need to set the one of them in your actions, but you will need to overwrite create and update to set the other.
Thanks for great plugin!
I have a question: what approach would you suggest if i want to inherit some of my controllers from SecureController with, say, permissions check in before_filter?
@Oleh, you have two options: 1) Move SecureController actions to a module or 2) use your SecureController and call inherit_resources inside your new controller:
class MyController < SecureController
inherit_resources
end
Thanx! I must read docs more carefully
[...] It supports nested and/or polymorphic relationships, I18n and other stuff like named scopes. [...]
[...] that, Inherited Resources was outdated and envy. It needed to be updated and it was: responders has been available in Inherited Resources for more than four months, and consequently in Rails [...]