Routing and has_many

Rails
1

Hi,
im a rails newbie, so please be gentle:

let’s say category habtm products and i’ve got a product with the id
7.

when i use the url

/categories/7/products

should the server show me only the categories of product 7?

On my Server it always shows all categories i have.

How do i solve this the right way?

I edited the routes.rb so, that

map.resources :categories, :has_many => [:products]

But this does not change anythings, using
/categories/7/products always leads to the index action of the
products controller.

Is the right way to test in the index action of the products
controller whether category_id is set in params and use this
information to only show products of this category? Or is there a
better way?

Thanks,

HansFH

2

On Aug 27, 2009, at 8:54 AM, hansfh wrote:

should the server show me only the categories of product 7?
/categories/7/products always leads to the index action of the
products controller.

Is the right way to test in the index action of the products
controller whether category_id is set in params and use this
information to only show products of this category? Or is there a
better way?

Thanks,

HansFH

If you have a line in ProductsController#index like:

@products = Product.find(:all)

Then of course you’ll see all products. The question is what you want
to see at that url. I’d expect to see all the products in category 7

def index
if find_category
@products = @category.products
else
flash[:error] = “No category with id=#{params[:category_id]}”
redirect_to categories_path
end
end
def find_category
@category = Category.find_by_id(params[:category_id])
end

And you can even put the find_category into a before_filter and
redirect from it directly.

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

3

2009/8/27 hansfh [email protected]:

But this does not change anythings, using
/categories/7/products always leads to the index action of the
products controller.

Is the right way to test in the index action of the products
controller whether category_id is set in params and use this
information to only show products of this category? Or is there a
better way?

I am not sure if this answers your question or not, and you may know
this already, but if you have found the product with id 7 and it is in
variable @product say, then the categories for that product are
available as an array in @product.categories.

Apologies if this is nothing to do with what you want to achieve.

Colin

4

It sounds like your routes are set up alright, but yeah, you’ll still
need to add code so your action knows how to handle it.

In your ProductsController#index action, you probably have something
like this?

@products = Product.all

Since you have category_id in the params, something like this should
work:

if params[:category_id]
@category = Category.find(params[:category_id])
@products = @category.products
end

Personally, if I have a controller that’s always used as a nested
resource, I put the initialization of the parent into a before_filter,
so it’s called for every action.