Question

Hey, i have some experience with MVC. but I’m new to rails. I’m using the scaffold command to generate some default files. The model looks clean and nice, but the controller and the views aren’t really dry. The contents of new.html.erb and edit.html.erb are almost the same and the methods new/edit and create/update are doing almost the same thing. In other frameworks i’ve used only one view for updating and creating new entries and also the same method in my controller by setting the id as an optional parameter. Do they use this structure to keep things RESTful (i have not much of a clue about rest :()? Is it the best practice to use this default stuff for crud?

Answer 1

The scaffold generator is a pretty good place to start. As you pointed out, there are some things which are not that great about it. I think most people take what the scaffold generates and then fix it up to their liking. For example, you can extract the form part from new.html.erb and edit.html.erb and place it in a partial _form.html.erb. Then update new.html.erb and edit.html.erb to include that partial to render the form. I think that for Rails 3, the scaffold generator has been changed to do this by default.

It does seem like new and edit, and create and update are pretty much the same, but you need to remember that they are mapped to different HTTP methods and URLs, which ties in to the whole RESTful resource idea. Check out the RailsGuides for routing, the section CRUD, Verbs, and Actions has a nice table of the seven different routes and the differences between them.