Updating a collection in a RESTful manner…

Hi,

Today I added a checkbox to each row of a table and a save button, to
perform an Archive operation on N items in the table.

This is essentially an update of the collection.

My initial thought was to PUT to students_path but only GET and POST
are allowed using the Rails RESTful routing.

I wound up adding an :collection => {:update_all => :put} to the
students routing and added an appropriate controller method.

I’m not terribly happy with this, stylistically, though,
pragmatically, it works.

What is the proper way to manage an update to a collection w/o having
to add an addition method to my controller?

Thanks very much,

-Tim

I would also like to know the correct way of doing a collection
update. but I, generally, use ajax for check box, so when user clicks
on the yes - no check box I make a put request to update 1 record at a
time.

Aashish

On 7 August 2010 22:07, Tim H. [email protected] wrote:

I’m not terribly happy with this, stylistically, though,
pragmatically, it works.

What is the proper way to manage an update to a collection w/o having
to add an addition method to my controller?

I don’t think you can avoid having an additional method in the
controller – after all, the code required to update the collection is
going to be different from any of your other actions. But you can
avoid exposing the name of that new method in the URL.

I would try manually defining a new PUT route outside of the existing
resource map:

map.connect ‘students’, :controller => ‘students’, :action =>
‘update_collection’, :conditions => {:method => :put}

That should route correctly if you have a form with :url =>
students_path, :method => :put.

There may be a cleverer/neater way to do this within the resource map
itself, but this at least is a good first thing to try.

Chris

@flyerhzm: I quite like the idea of updating the owner of the collection
in
the case that there is one. There certainly was in my case, but it feels
weird to PUT from /school/students to /school, for example.

@chrismear: Your additional route seems cleaner than the :collection =>
{:update_all => :put} but the Wikipedia entry for REST seems to suggest
that
a PUT to the collection URL should replace the entire collection with
another collection so perhaps merely updating some attributes of some of
the
collection breaks architectural agreement.

On 10 August 2010 09:27, flyerhzm [email protected] wrote:

itself, but this at least is a good first thing to try.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.


Tim H.

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Here is an advise for “What is the Restful manner for updating a
collection?”

http://rails-bestpractices.com/questions/3-what-is-the-restful-manner-for-updating-a-collection