# RESTful design **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [October 1, 2009, 7:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-design/176487 "2009-10-01T07:44:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/a5b964/32.png) [@paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/paulbutcher)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 7:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-design/176487/1 "2009-10-01T07:44:58Z")
I have difficulties to get into restful thinking, so sorry for a possibly stupid question. How do you deal with a product listing which has one interface for admin and another for customers? It needs more methods than the ones in rest, right? There must be plenty of similar situations which makes restful design less logical. ---
**Author:** ![paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/a5b964/32.png) [@paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/paulbutcher)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 8:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-design/176487/2 "2009-10-01T08:01:51Z")
No, it doesn’t necessarily need more actions. Changing the product’s price? that’s an update Changing its on-hand quantity? That’s an update Changing it’s availability? That’s an update. You may opt to have two controllers for your products… one for the public pages where the products are displayed and then a different one for product managemet, or you may instead opt to show different views to your customers vs your admins. You also don’t _have_ to follow the Rails REST pattern if you don’t want to, but it does make things easier once you get the hang of it. It’s important to remember that while the default Rails REST scaffolding maps a model to a controller, - A “resource” can be a controller that exists without a model (Sessions) - You can have several resources pointing to one model (AvailableProducts, SaleItems) - A model doesn’t _have_ to be backed by a database - You are allowed to tack on additional methods map.resources :producs, :member =\> {:approve =\> :put, :reject =\> :put}, :collection =\>{:available =\> :get} Hope that helps some. 2009/10/1 PÃ¥l Bergström [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/a5b964/32.png) [@paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/paulbutcher)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 11:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-design/176487/3 "2009-10-01T11:24:39Z")
Brian H. wrote: > Hope that helps some. It does. Thanks 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/a5b964/32.png) [@paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/paulbutcher)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 2:42am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-design/176487/4 "2009-10-02T02:42:39Z")
Pål Bergström wrote: > I have difficulties to get into restful thinking, so sorry for a > possibly stupid question. > > How do you deal with a product listing which has one interface for admin > and another for customers? It needs more methods than the ones in rest, > right? > > There must be plenty of similar situations which makes restful design > less logical. I replied to a very similar question a day or two ago. Rails provides namespaced resources for just this sort of need. See the following reply: [http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/196355#new](http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/196355#new) ---
**Author:** ![paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/a5b964/32.png) [@paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/paulbutcher)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 12:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-design/176487/5 "2009-10-02T12:12:51Z")
Robert W. wrote: > I replied to a very similar question a day or two ago. > > Rails provides namespaced resources for just this sort of need. > > See the following reply: > [2 RESTful controllers for the same resource - Rails - Ruby-Forum](http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/196355#new) Thank you. However I still not sure I see the benefit from the old way. Especially when you have a lot of extra logic and presentations/views. I mean work-wise it must mean equally much work. Are there any professional rails programmers that doesn’t work with RESTful design, and if so why? ---
**Author:** ![paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/a5b964/32.png) [@paulbutcher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/paulbutcher)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2009, 4:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/restful-design/176487/6 "2009-10-02T16:45:20Z")
PÃ¥l Bergström wrote: > Robert W. wrote: > > > I replied to a very similar question a day or two ago. > > > > Rails provides namespaced resources for just this sort of need. > > > > See the following reply: > > [2 RESTful controllers for the same resource - Rails - Ruby-Forum](http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/196355#new) > > Thank you. However I still not sure I see the benefit from the old way. > Especially when you have a lot of extra logic and presentations/views. I > mean work-wise it must mean equally much work. I don’t view the RESTful design as an effort to reduce the amount of work. It’s not about that at all in my view. Compare it to the benefit of testing. I think everyone would agree that doing TDD/BDD add more work up front. It certainly add more lines of code the develop has to write. What we hope for from testing is that it will make life easier later and raise our confidence in the code we write. The benefit is similar with RESTful Rails (at least as I see it). Before the new RESTful style everyone was just doing their own thing by defining routes to arbitrary actions with little consistency. The new way imposes new conventions removing even more decisions about how to architect an application. Eliminating decisions sounds like a bad thing to a lot of people. Maybe that has some merit when there’s just one developer on a project. But, when you work in a team (or open source) these types of decisions are bad. Reducing the number of design decisions leads to more maintainable code, and a more consistent architecture. More consistent architecture reduces the effort when looking at other people’s code. You begin to expect certain things in certain places with specific names. This mean you don’t have to spend time deciphering what the developer means by “show,” “new,” “create”, etc. These actions are now defined by convention. People often seem to confuse “convention” with “limitation.” I don’t see that the RESTful design imposes any limitations on your overall design. It only imposes conventions for the things that all applications need to perform like listing, creating, changing, showing and destroying things. So maybe you don’t see the benefits, possibly because you haven’t given REST a real chance to grab your imagination, or it just doesn’t fit your development style. I started off struggling with this idea myself so I put my mind to work studying to understand why it has merit. I now feel the freedom of not having the think about these basic design decisions, so I go on with what makes my application unique and interesting. > Are there any professional rails programmers that doesn’t work with > RESTful design, and if so why? I’m sure there probably are, but I think the number of them are shrinking as more developers begin to see the benefits of REST. One thing that I’m pretty sure about is that RESTful design is here to stay. I believe all future development of the Rails framework will focus on making that design style better. I imagine pretty much no effort will be spent on the “old” style. I don’t think it will be removed from Rails anytime soon, but the RESTful style has been hugely successful and I think that’s great. All this being said, if you’re the architect of your own project then do things however you want. But, if you ever need to work with a team of Rails developers you might have a battle on your hands. I also think that the vast majority of feedback you get from this forum will encourage the RESTful design style.