EmphasizedInsanity at /life

Preface

The best way to get started with Rails 2.x nested routing and routing at all, is to read the official Rails Routing guide at the Rails Guides website.

Rails Nested Routes/Resources

The rails nested routes/resources were indroduced at Rails 1.2 as part of the RESTful approach that was adopted by the Rails core members.
Nested resources allowed urls like:

/tasks/?project_id=1

To have a bit more sexy/RESTful look:

/projects/1/tasks

Let�s use this example to make things a little more clear, we will use 2 models, Project and Task

	
/app/models/project.rb

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base

	has_many :tasks

end


	
/app/models/task.rb

class Task < ActiveRecord::Base

	belongs_to :project

end

Setting up routes.rb

Creating a Nested Resource

:has_many keyword

The easiest way to create a nested route, is to use the :has_many keyword like that:

# /config/routes.rb
map.resources :projects, :has_many => :tasks

# and the correspondent task resource
map.resources :tasks

Adding the second routes, that defines a RESTful route to :tasks, depends if you would like to allow an access to the Task resource, without the project context, this is not a must.

Block

You can also specify the sub-resources in a block

map.resources :projects do |project|

	project.resources :tasks

end

Singular Resources

Just the same:

map.resources :projects do |project|

	project.resource :design_document

end

Routes Helpers

Run:

$ rake routes

to see what kind of routes do you have in your application, you can pipe UNIX�s grep command (�| grep xxx�) to filter the results:

$ rake routes | grep project

A basic map.resources :projects will produce:

                 

            events GET    /projects         

formatted_projects GET    /projects.:format        

                   POST   /projects         

                   POST   /projects.:format 

       new_project GET    /projects/new

but for a Nested route, like we defined before will produce:

 project_tasks     GET /projects/:project_id/tasks

new_project_task   GET /projects/:project_id/tasks/new

edit_project_task  GET /projects/:project_id/tasks/:id/edit

project_task       GET /projects/:project_id/tasks/:id

sweet.

Singular Nested Route Helpers

(from the example above)

/projects – list all projects

/projects/1 – show a single project

/projects/1/design_document – a project�s design document

Using the routing helpers

Since we now have another resource in context when we want o use the new helpers, we need to include that resource instance as a paramter:

new_project_task(@project)


	
or when both resources are required

edit_project_task(project, @task)
</pre>
<br />
<h2>Forms</h2><br />
I'll assume you use form_for in your forms, it will make the usage of nested resources a lot easier than to work with plain HTML or form_tag.<br />
The regular form we know of form_for, receives one instance as the form object:<br />
<pre class="brush: rails">
&lt;% form_for(project) do |f| >

	…

< end >

But with nested resources, we’ll pimp it up a little bit:

< form_for([ @project, @task ]) do |f| >

	…

< end %>

Note the instances array, that specifies the objects we need in our form when we deal with nested resources

Controller

In the most basic way of nested resources, the nested resource is inaccessible without the context of the parent resource.
This example explains how to handle that kind of situation.
Well, we do know that we get at least 1 id when we deal with nested resources, the parent resource’s id, remember?

/projects/1/tasks/new

so we’ll add a before_filter to get the project instance:

	
on TasksControlller

before_filter :get_project

private

def get_project

	@project = Project.find(params[:project_id])

end

So we’ll have our parent resource whenever we do it. in our actions we can use the parent resource instance to create the nested resource:

	
TasksController

def create

	@project.tasks.build(params[:task])

	if @project.save

   		respond_to …

   		end

	else

   		respond_to …

   		end

	end

end

Conclusion and some Gotchas.

Using nested resources and routes is the right thing, URLs are clear, and code is readable. but:

• You should not implement nested resources of more than 2 levels.


• Setting up pagination support (?page=3) kind of breaks the RESTful approach.


• The railscast about Nested Resources.


• Ryan Daigle about nested_attributes and how to use them with nested resources


• Using RESTful ajax calls, a great lib by dfr|work (#rubyonrails).