# REST seems goood, accept for one thing

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-seems-goood-accept-for-one-thing/131124>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 6, 2008, 9:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-seems-goood-accept-for-one-thing/131124 "2008-03-06T09:02:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Fredrik\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/bc79bd/32.png) [@Fredrik\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Fredrik_K)\
**Post date:** [March 6, 2008, 9:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-seems-goood-accept-for-one-thing/131124/1 "2008-03-06T09:02:56Z")

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Hi,

After having been given som references concerining this hip new REST  
thing (thanks Mathieu) it seems that REST, especially the nested  
resources bit, is for me. I am trying to develop a membership  
administration application specifi for my sport, so I really like the  
idea of being able to “enter” a club and doing everything in the  
context of that club in an explicit way (i.e. not setting a session  
variable and all that).

This means, of course, that a member is a member of a club. This is  
all very good for most situations, however, I would like to develop a  
statistics module for the entire organization (i.e. all clubs). Now,  
since members is only used within a club, it seems that this would  
mean iterating through al clubs, joining the membership lists,  
resorting them and THEN begin to dispay statistics. Seems very  
un-rails-like.

The suggested solution I can come up with is to have a new model  
organisation to which all clubs belong and has a has\_many -  
relationship with members, through clubs. Then, have a nested resource  
where members is in organisation (whith an id which is always 1).

Would this work? Are there potential conflicts involved in having  
multiple nested routes with the same resource?

I’m not really a strong enough Rails developer for this 🙂 so I  
appreciate all the help I can get !

/Fredrik

–  
“Give up learning, and put an end to your troubles.”

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Fredrik\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/bc79bd/32.png) [@Fredrik\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Fredrik_K)\
**Post date:** [March 6, 2008, 9:21am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-seems-goood-accept-for-one-thing/131124/2 "2008-03-06T09:21:09Z")

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what kind of statistics do you want to provide? Will something like  
the following not work?

map.resources :clubs, :collection =\> { :statistics =\> :any }

class Club \< AR::Base  
has\_many :members  
end

class Member \< AR::Base  
belongs\_to :club  
end

class ClubsController \< ApplicationController

# GET /clubs/statistics

def statistics  
@clubs = Club.find(:all, :include =\> :members, :order =\> ‘name’)  
end  
end

clubs/statistics.rhtml

\<% for club in @clubs -%\>  
Name: \<%= club.name %\>  
Number of members: \<%= club.members.length %\>  
… etc  
\<% end -%\>

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Fredrik\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/bc79bd/32.png) [@Fredrik\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Fredrik_K)\
**Post date:** [March 6, 2008, 7:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-seems-goood-accept-for-one-thing/131124/3 "2008-03-06T19:10:58Z")

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The simplest approach may be a named route. In your routes.rb you  
would add:

map.statistics ‘/  
statistics’, :controller=\>‘members’, :action=\>‘statistics’

That named route would allow you to put something like this in a view:

\<%= link\_to ‘statistics’, :url=\>statistics\_url, … %\>

Then your controller would:

class MembersController \< ApplicationController  
def statistics  
@members = Member.find(:all, – your statistics criteria here --)  
… your additional manipulation here …

```
respond_to ...
end

```

end  
end

Note that the method in question knows that it deals with all members  
generally, not that subset of members belonging to a particular club.

There are a few other options available as well. One would be to have  
both a nested and non-nested map.resources statement in your routes.rb  
for the members. I’d shy away from this as it could get messy and the  
url would not be ‘pretty’ (IMO).

Another would be to create a new _controller_. A point that many  
people miss is that a resource need not have a 1-for-1 correlation to  
a model. It could be a subset of the model attributes or a  
combination of two or more resources. What’s important is that a  
resource be addressable and respond to a certain set of requests.  
With that in mind you could consider a ‘statistic’ resource to be the  
cumulative totals for a member, the name of the member that compiled  
them, and the club for which that member plays. Your  
StatisticsController#index would retrieve those in whatever way made  
the most sense (probably Member.find(:all, :include=\>:club, …)).  
Taking that approach you get a pretty url and a view/controller  
dedicated to statistics rendering (very clear separation of concerns).

HTH,  
AndyV