# REST - Some doubts **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [January 23, 2009, 9:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-some-doubts/158485 "2009-01-23T21:10:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/838e76/32.png) [@homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homunculus)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2009, 9:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-some-doubts/158485/1 "2009-01-23T21:10:16Z")
Hi, I recently started using rest for building some new rails apps. I find it great and clean, but when I started a big project some days ago some doubts come to my mind. First of all, after implementing the user management and authentication system (which in my case is quite complex) I noticed my routes.rb file was already fairly big. It seemed to be reasonable to me since I have to perform lot of operations on the users of my app, especially form the admin namespace, but the fact that I just started the project and I already have this huge routing files scares me. Moreover, I’m used to have a lot of helper actions to handle calls to link\_to\_remote (used for example to dynamically change form fields based on user input). Some of these calls can be handled by the classic REST actions with respond\_to, but for others it just makes sense to have a custom action, and this forces me to insert a custom route every time in my routes.rb file. The same applies to small actions like “activate” or “block” for users. I know that in the REST way of doing things this could be done by creating separate controllers, but this seems stupid to me (especially in my case, I’ll be force to create one such controller for each user type, with subsequent route definition). I hope someone can help me clarify those doubts. Thank you in advance (and sorry for the english, it’s not my native language) ---
**Author:** ![homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/838e76/32.png) [@homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homunculus)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2009, 9:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-some-doubts/158485/2 "2009-01-23T21:15:25Z")
Hi Simone, In your “activate” and “block” actions can’t you just use the common “update” action, just passing the necessary parameters? It would be as simple as receiving an “user[ativated] = false” from the request and you could probably reuse the already implemented “update” action in your controller. I’ve killed many unecessary named routes by using the already implemented actions and parameters. - Maurício Linhares [http://alinhavado.wordpress.com/](http://alinhavado.wordpress.com/) (pt-br) | [http://blog.codevader.com/](http://blog.codevader.com/) (en) On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Simone G. ---
**Author:** ![homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/838e76/32.png) [@homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homunculus)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2009, 9:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-some-doubts/158485/3 "2009-01-23T21:29:28Z")
Hi Maurício, thanks for your reply. In fact I can’t just reuse another action because it’s not just a matter of changing a field in the database (which in that case update could be ok), I also perform some background operations like sending emails and updating other protected fields of the model (like date of activation or removing activation code). To do that I need to call a model method like user.activate or user.block, and it would be a mess probably to integrate this behaviour inside the update method. ---
**Author:** ![homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/838e76/32.png) [@homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homunculus)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2009, 9:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-some-doubts/158485/4 "2009-01-23T21:35:25Z")
You don’t need to integrated it at the update\_attributes method, here’s an example: class User def activate( save = true ) ##do activate stuff and save the model if save == true end def activated=( new\_value ) selc.ativate(true) if new\_value == true and self.read\_attribute(:ativated) == false end end You would just pass the activated attribute value and “activate” or deactivate the user as required and without writting a new action. But if something like this doesn’t work for your model, i guess you’re out of luck. - Maurício Linhares [http://alinhavado.wordpress.com/](http://alinhavado.wordpress.com/) (pt-br) | [http://blog.codevader.com/](http://blog.codevader.com/) (en) On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 5:29 PM, Simone G. ---
**Author:** ![homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/838e76/32.png) [@homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homunculus)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2009, 9:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-some-doubts/158485/5 "2009-01-23T21:51:57Z")
Well, mine is already big, 264 lines and counting. The first thing that i did was to group as many controllers with only the default routes as possible, as in: map.resources :users, :clients, :products They used to be in separate places and where making the file bigger for no reason. Another thing was to move the “admin” controllers basic config to a block, and just call the block when i needed to configure an admin controller, here’s a sample: admin\_configurer = Proc.new do |resource\_name, options | options ||= {} map.resources resource\_name, { :path\_prefix =\> ‘/manage’, :name\_prefix =\> ‘manage\_’, :controller =\> “manage/#{resource\_name}” }.merge( options ) end admin\_configurer.call :deactivated\_users, :member =\> {:define =\> :put} admin\_configurer.call :products I removed a lot of uneeded lines with this, but I still got a big routes file, i guess it’s something we’ll need to live with. My next idea was to separate the routes in “areas” and then get each of those areas in a separate file and eval it at the routes.rb “draw” call, but I haven’t really done that as i think it isn’t needed, at least for now. - Maurício Linhares [http://alinhavado.wordpress.com/](http://alinhavado.wordpress.com/) (pt-br) | [http://blog.codevader.com/](http://blog.codevader.com/) (en) On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 5:45 PM, Simone G. ---
**Author:** ![homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/838e76/32.png) [@homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homunculus)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2009, 10:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-some-doubts/158485/6 "2009-01-23T22:02:58Z")
Thanks again Maurício, good advices as before. Maybe I was too used with the classic small CRUD routing idea, but I guess that as long as it doesn’t create any slowness problem probably the big routes file is unavoidable for complex applications. ---
**Author:** ![homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/838e76/32.png) [@homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homunculus)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2009, 6:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-some-doubts/158485/7 "2009-01-24T18:36:09Z")
Sorry to butt in, and this is unconfirmed info, but I swear that I heard a rumor of Rails 3 (the new Rails/Merb combo powerhouse) support for Maurício’s concept of routes “areas.” It would be a nice way to separate things out and lazy load only what you need at run time. Having a routes folder with specialized routes (even that dreaded default when needed) would be sweet. Routes do get rather large even on some simple apps and it would be nice to have a way to trim things down. +1 for that idea, Maurício. On Jan 23, 4:02 pm, Simone G. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/838e76/32.png) [@homunculus](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homunculus)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2009, 9:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rest-some-doubts/158485/8 "2009-01-23T21:45:00Z")
Not out of luck I’ll say, that’s a good idea, thanks for the tip. As for the routes file becoming big, do you have some idea about it?