I am curious what folks do with the #show action (and its associated
view)
in a RESTful application.
How often is it used?
It seems to me that, for the sorts of applications I can envision, it
probably wouldn’t be used much at all. Everything I might want to show
can
be displayed by the #index action. Is that true more or less often than
not?
If there isn’t anything to be gained by a #show action, what do folks do
(if
anything) to disable it?
I have seen a use for #show in the classic case of a blog, where the
index
page shows the titles of each of the entries in the blog, but the user
must
click on one of those titles to “show” the actual blog post, but that
brings
up a related (and nearly identical) question…
I can see the same issue with the #new action for a nested route. Again
in
the classic blog application, the #show action for the post would
probably
include a form for adding a comment, thus eliminating the need for a #new
action (and its view) .
What do you folks with vastly more RoR experience than I do in these
situations? Is there a best practice? Is there a common practice?
I use the show action to display specific forums and topics in rboard:
.
As for the new comment form, you don’t need to have all the 7 restful
actions and if it makes more sense for your application to have a form
for creating a new comment resource inside the page for a blog
resource then that’s fine imo.
I guess it’s all in the design… and the intent of the application…
my users tend to stay in the show or edit views for the majority of
their time…
My show view has all the detailed information for the individual models
that just get a name, a description and a few choice tidbits in the
index view.
From ‘show’, the right nav “context” menu lets the users traverse the
model relationships with a simple hyperlink click (Functional
Requirement X is related to an Marketing Requirements Document, a
Marketing Requirement, one or more Projects, one or more Applications,
one or more Test Cases, one or more Scenarios, etc, etc, etc. Following
relationships goes from show to show, and from a show, you can create or
remove relationships to existing models, or create new models to be
related from the context of the current model, generate PDFs, perform a
traceability analysis, etc.
There is a top nav which lets you get to any index view if you want to
navigate to a model “outside” the current context (i.e., not related to
the model you’re currently looking at).
Right after I clicked “Send”, I thought to myself, Hmmm… I wonder if
map.resources has a :only or :exclude options. Sure enough, it does.
That
answers my original question of “what should I do with the #show or #edit”
actions if I don’t see a need for them in my application?" – I can
exclude
the routes from being generated for them.
Andrew,
I would love to see your application in action – is it open source, or,
at
least running on the web somewhere?
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Patrick D. [email protected]
wrote:
I am curious what folks do with the #show action (and its associated view)
in a RESTful application.
How often is it used?
? I’ve never done (or even imagined) an app that doesn’t use it.
It seems to me that, for the sorts of applications I can envision, it
probably wouldn’t be used much at all. Everything I might want to show can
be displayed by the #index action. Is that true more or less often than
not?
Typically, the index page lists multiple instances of a thing (model) –
people, groups, bikes, t-shirts – with links to ‘show’ you a detail
view
of a single instance of that model.
That’s a classic web design pattern, regardless of platform.