# Couple questions, mainly around RESTful resourcing

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/couple-questions-mainly-around-restful-resourcing/105586>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [May 31, 2007, 1:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/couple-questions-mainly-around-restful-resourcing/105586 "2007-05-31T13:22:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![arachnd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/278dde/32.png) [@arachnd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/arachnd)\
**Post date:** [May 31, 2007, 1:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/couple-questions-mainly-around-restful-resourcing/105586/1 "2007-05-31T13:22:58Z")

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Let’s say we have users, posts, and comments.

I figured that in order to show a list of posts from a user, I’d have  
to nest it.

All good, I figured it out without too much trouble, but then after a  
while I started to get confused. Where would I place comments if I  
want it to be nested under posts? Nest it 2 levels down? I hear it’s  
best to keep it only one level, so I’m not sure the best route to take  
for this type of setup.

If anyone could give some feedback on that, I’d really appreciate it.

Next, how would I take care of the ‘admin’ side of things RESTfully?

1. How could I specify a user to be an admin, “virtually” (without a  
field in the database) I saw something like this in the environment.rb  
from Railsconf

2. Should there be a completely different admin “abstract” controller?  
That doesn’t make much “DRYness” sense to me, so I think I could use  
the same controllers as any other, but restrict the actions to only an  
admin with a before filter or something?

So if anyone could give some feedback on these two RESTful problems,  
I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks!

p.s: if anyone knows RSpec pretty well, could you help me understand  
why my posts\_spec is blowing up with this restful routes stuff? 🙂

[http://pastie.caboo.se/66440](http://pastie.caboo.se/66440)

Thanks again!

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**Author:** ![arachnd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/278dde/32.png) [@arachnd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/arachnd)\
**Post date:** [May 31, 2007, 7:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/couple-questions-mainly-around-restful-resourcing/105586/2 "2007-05-31T19:12:47Z")

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I think you need to stub User.find too

On May 31, 7:22 am, “[DanielFischer.com](http://DanielFischer.com)” [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![arachnd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/278dde/32.png) [@arachnd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/arachnd)\
**Post date:** [June 1, 2007, 2:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/couple-questions-mainly-around-restful-resourcing/105586/3 "2007-06-01T02:25:32Z")

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I’ve tried that and no luck.

Anyone have a response to the other things?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![arachnd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/278dde/32.png) [@arachnd](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/arachnd)\
**Post date:** [June 1, 2007, 5:56am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/couple-questions-mainly-around-restful-resourcing/105586/4 "2007-06-01T05:56:48Z")

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On May 31, 7:24 pm, “[DanielFischer.com](http://DanielFischer.com)” [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> Anyone have a response to the other things?

Good questions… I’ll take a shot.

Regarding user/posts/comments, I personally don’t think it’s a problem  
to nest two levels deep in this case; however, it’s easy to forget  
that you can provide multiple routes to your resources, and that can  
avoid the two-deep scenario:

map.resources :users do |user|  
user.resources :posts  
end

map.resources :posts do |post|  
post.resources :comments  
end

So then:

/users/34/posts # =\> all the posts for user #34

Now that you can get a list of the post ids for that user, you can  
plug those into:

/posts/19/comments

Hopefully you can see where I’m going… I’m just saying, you don’t  
have to nest if you don’t want to, and usually you can avoid it.

Regarding the Admin stuff, usually just going with a before filter  
works great. Set instance variables as needed so the view can know  
what it needs to display.

Jeff