Question

A typical Rails route like:

 resource :customer

Sets up routes for index, show, etc.

To access all the customers, I can use the route

/customers

To access a single customer, I use:

/customers/1

Whats the most concise, RESTful way to create a route and controller action that would allow a user to view a set of customers, i.e. something like

/customers/[1,2,3,4,5]

Updated with rationale

The use case:

• This action will be called via Javascript to provide details on selected users. If a user selects 3 customers through the interface, I would like one request to pull info for all 3, instead of having to make 3 separate requests

Answer 1

You could just keep your routes simple: resources :customers.

The list of ids would be considered as the :id by the routes, and you would get [1, 2, 3, 4] in params[:id].

Then in your controller, in a before_filter for example, you can check if the id matches a certain regexp (like… /\[(\d,)*\d\]/), and if it’s the case you can extract the ids.