Model using external data source?

Rails
1

Hi, I am writing a management system and one of the datasource is
external(read-only) and I need to use REST API to access them. Can I
just
reuse the Model part of MVC but override those database access methods
to
do REST calls instead?

Thanks,
Zhongjie

2

On Tuesday, September 25, 2012 1:08:46 AM UTC-7, Zhongjie Wu wrote:

Hi, I am writing a management system and one of the datasource is
external(read-only) and I need to use REST API to access them. Can I just
reuse the Model part of MVC but override those database access methods to
do REST calls instead?

Absolutely. The objects in your model don’t have to inherit from
ActiveRecord or any other part of Rails if you don’t need them to. Just
write up an object to wrap the API calls.

Rails used to have a module called ActiveResource for this, but it seems
nobody liked it enough to keep it working, so it was dropped. In my
current
project, I just have to read from the REST API, and
GitHub - archiloque/rest-client: A link to the new repository is working well so far.

-David

3

Great. Thanks for pointing it out.