REST, routes and algorithms

Rails
1

I’m reading the book ‘RESTful web services’ and in the discussion on
exposing algorithmic resources it says the following:

"
Most web applications don’t store much state in path variables: they use
query variables instead. You may have seen URIs like this:
• http://www.example.com/articles?start=20061201&end=20071201

Those URIs would look better without the query variables:
• http://www.example.com/articles/20061201-20071201
"

What is the Rails way for exposing algorithmic resources? Is it via the
first URL in the example or the second? If it is the second, please can
you give me some guidance on how to achieve this.
Thanks

2

start, finish = “20061201-20071201”.split(‘-’)

“end” is reserved keyword

Tim C. wrote:

"

What is the Rails way for exposing algorithmic resources? Is it via the
first URL in the example or the second? If it is the second, please can
you give me some guidance on how to achieve this.
Thanks

–
irfani

Y! irfani_s

3

Those URIs would look better without the query variables:
• http://www.example.com/articles/20061201-20071201
"

What is the Rails way for exposing algorithmic resources? Is it via the
first URL in the example or the second? If it is the second, please can
you give me some guidance on how to achieve this.
Thanks

Rails conventions says that /articles/20061201-20071201 finds the
article with the id ‘20061201-20071201’. Anything other than that would
be unconventional.

There are of course conventions to breaking the conventions, though ; )
Personally, I’d do something like map.article_range ‘/articles/:range’,
:action => ‘range’, :requirements => {:range => /(d+)-(d+)/}. In the
‘range’ action, I’d do what YangBaikHati suggests above. start, finish =
params[:range].split(‘-’).