Action names in RESTful URLs

Rails
1

A probably noob-ish question about the restful urls, but I searched
the groups archives and could not find it.

IIUC, “GET /users/bob” should return a page showing information about
the user identified with “bob”, while “GET /users/new” returns a page
with a form for creating a new user.

Ain’t there an ambiguity there? Does that mean that I have to make
sure that no user chooses “new” as his id?

2

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 19:04, Éric Malenfant [email protected]
wrote:

A probably noob-ish question about the restful urls, but I searched
the groups archives and could not find it.

IIUC, “GET /users/bob” should return a page showing information about
the user identified with “bob”, while “GET /users/new” returns a page
with a form for creating a new user.

Ain’t there an ambiguity there? Does that mean that I have to make
sure that no user chooses “new” as his id?

If you retrieve them by name, yes, but usually what I’ve seen,
especially with Rails, is retrieval by ID number. So, you’d have GET
/users/23 or whatever, who may happen to be named Bob. Or if you want
to get them by name, GET /users/search?name=bob, or maybe even
/users/show?name=bob, or if the name isn’t unique, possibly
/users/index?name=bob.

-Dave

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3

Éric Malenfant wrote:

A probably noob-ish question about the restful urls, but I searched
the groups archives and could not find it.

IIUC, “GET /users/bob” should return a page showing information about
the user identified with “bob”, while “GET /users/new” returns a page
with a form for creating a new user.

Ain’t there an ambiguity there? Does that mean that I have to make
sure that no user chooses “new” as his id?

If you use such “permalinks” to identify the individual resources
instead of their primary key id, then you’ll need to make sure you add
validation to make sure the resource URI is unique. “GET /users/new” is
itself a resource identifier URI. It refers to the “New Form” resource.
Similarly the “Edit Form” resource has the “GET /users/edit” identifier
URI.

Using the model’s simple integer primary key in the resource URI
eliminates this issue. I’ve seen some people combine the id with a
textual identifier to produce URI’s like “GET /users/1-bob” which would
also solve this issue. “GET /users/2-new” would be distinct from “GET
/users/new” so there would be no conflict. As a bonus the resource can
still be easily queried by primary key by parsing “1-bob” into the
integer 1, which matches the id for Bob’s record.

@user = User.find(“1-bob”.to_i) # User.find(1)