Ranges in RESTful resources

Rails
1

Hi,

I am writing an application with nested resources. I have a resource
called Facilities which has_many Reservations.

map.resources :facilities do |facilities|
facilities.resources :reservations
end

I have thus urls like

/facilities/1/reservations
/facilities/1/reservations/4

I have the possibility to show a list of all reservations - the index
action, and a particular reservation - the
show action. How do I list all reservations between 10. April 10:00 and
12. April 20:00 ?

How do I list ranges in RESTful resources?

Cheers,

evgeni

2

Add a select (you can probably think of a better name) action to the
reservations_controller and pass the start date and end date to it
through the URL?

For example:

In routes.rb:

map.resources :facilities do |facilities|
facilities.resources :reservations, :collection => { :select => :get }
end

In your views:

<%= link_to select_facility_resources(@facility, :start_date =>
@start_date, :end_date => @end_date) -%>

Might want to change the format of the dates you pass in the URL.

In reservations_controller:

GET /facilities/1/reservations/select

GET /facilities/1/reservations/select.xml

def select
…

Find the reservations using params[:start_date] and

params[:end_date]

Also might want to perform some checking on these dates (encapsulate

in Reservation model?)

@reservations = @facility.reservations.find…(…)

respond_to do |format|
format.html { render :action => :index } # Or use select.html.erb
format.xml { render :xml => @reservations }
end
end

An other option is to simply re-use the index action (rather than a
separate action) for this, and check in there whether a date range is
passed in. If so, find the reservations based on that range, otherwise
default to finding all reservations. Not sure which option is more
elegant.

3

Hi Gerjan,

thank you for your proposal. Sounds really
streightforward. Is this approach along the RESTful lines? I have read
the following discussion:

http://groups.google.ca/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/e1759be395695179/2cd53b5742b7bec2

I have been thinking about my problem for a couple of days now and I
still think there should be a simpler solution. Maybe ranges should be
treated as another resource. But then they share the same set of data
with the index action. Sounds like a “2 Controller-one Model-thing” DHH
was talking on the Eurocon about. Hmm …

Cheers,

evgeni