Question

I have a “Company” which has “Projects” within them. As time goes on we now need to add “Links” that are related to “Projects”. My routes currently look like the following:

resources :companies do
  resources :projects do
    resources :links
  end
end

This seems wrong due to the nesting 2 levels deep. I also no longer have new_company_project_path(@company) anymore if I nest like this which now denies me to ever creating projects for a company.

I will need to add other models to relate to Projects in the coming months.

Here is my Projects model and my Links model as well..

class Link < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :link_name, :url, :description

  belongs_to :project
end

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :company
  belongs_to :user

  validates :title, :presence => true

  validates :description, :presence => true,
                          :length   => { :minimum => 10 } 
end

It would seem nesting is not the proper way. If nesting is not the proper way, how does one go about saving the association? For example, in my current controller I save my nested objects by doing this:

class ProjectsController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :authenticate_user!
  before_filter :find_company

  def new
    @project = @company.projects.build
  end

  def create
    @project = @company.projects.build(params[:project])
    if @project.save
      flash[:notice] = "Project has been created."
      redirect_to [@company, @project]
    else
      flash[:alert] = "Project has not been created."
      render :action => "new"
    end
  end

  private
    def find_company
      @company = Company.find(params[:company_id])
    end
end

I can’t find too much info on this subject and the books I read before used nesting routes only 1 level deep and others don’t nest at all.

So, what is the best way to do this so that I can have “Links” and other models related to “Projects” while “Projects” remain related to “Companies”?

Answer 1

You can handle it with shallow nested routes like this:

resources :companies do
  resources :projects
end

resources :projects do
  resources :links
  resources :sausages
  resources :patties
end

Then you have routes like new_company_project_path, new_project_link_path, etc.