Preferred way to disable parts of a RESTful resource?

Rails
1

Hi all -

I’ve got my RESTful resource all setup. However, there is no editing
or destroying allowed. What’s the preferred way to disable those?

  • remove the action? (don’t like this idea)
  • redirect within the action skipping the actual edit/destroy call?
  • returning an error? (is there a standard here?)

Thanks!

-philip

2

remove the action (method) from the controller. if you don’t want
code to be executed, don’t provide the code to execute.

3

def edit
render ‘404.html’
end

def destroy
render ‘404.html’
end

4

Hi,

According to the HTTP specs, when a particular request method isn’t
supported for a resource identified by a URI, server should return 405
HTTP code.

Wojtek

5

On Jul 21, 2008, at 2:54 PM, jemminger wrote:

remove the action (method) from the controller. if you don’t want
code to be executed, don’t provide the code to execute.

The drawback to this is that a RESTful client isn’t going to get any
notification about why those actions/verbs don’t work. It would be
nice to provide an error message of some sort “This functionality is
intentionally not enabled…” or something.

Doesn’t look like there is a preferred way so I’ll just roll my own.

Thanks for everyone’s replies.

6

Aloha Philip,

We use:

def delete
respond_to do |format|
format.html raise(:method_not_allowed)
format.xml {render :xml=>exception, :status=>405}
end
end

for any methods that aren’t allowed. As Wojtek said, you are supposed
to return a 405 on items that aren’t allowed not a 404.

Best of luck,

DrMark

On Jul 22, 9:15 am, Wojciech P. [email protected]