Question

I have a problem where I need values passed in from a GET request and I don’t know how to set up the routing definition.

My Category object has a type(string),a color(string) and many products. I want to create a simple web service that lets the caller get all of a Category’s products by passing in the Category’s type and color:

http://www.myapp.com/getProducts?catType=toy&color=red

or ?

http://www.myapp.com/categories/getProducts?catType=toy&color=red

How do I define the correct routing for this situation? Are there better ways to do this in a Restful manner… because I know that Rails is Restful, so if there is a way to do it “correctly” then that would be even better.

Thanks

Answer 1

Your first example:

map.getproduct '/getProduct', :controller => 'your_controller', :action => 'your_action'

In controller you will have catType and color in params hash:

params[:catType]
=> 'toy'
params[:color]
=> 'red'

Is there better way? Probably yes, but it depends on your needs. If you will always have catType and color parameters, than you can add route like this:

map.getproduct '/getProduct/:catType/:color', :controller => 'your_controller', :action => 'your_action'

You will have access to those parameters with params hash like in previous example. And your urls will look like this:

www.myapp.com/getProduct/toy/red

If your parameters may change, you can use route globbing:

    map.getproduct '/getProduct/*query', :controller => 'your_controller', :action => 'your_action'

Then it will catch all request that has www.my.app.com/getProduct/... at the begining. But you will have more work in controller. You will have access to query with this:

 params[:query]

and for www.myapp.com/getProduct/color/red/catType/toy it will give:

 params[:query]
 => ['color', 'red', 'catType', 'toy]

So you have to parse it manualy.