Question

I have a Rails application which has an Employee model, a Skill model and a Department model.

class Employee < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :department
  has_and_belongs_to_many :skills
  attr_accessible :email, :firstname, :name, :twitter
end

class Skill < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :employees
  attr_accessible :name
end

class Department < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :name
end

I was trying to write down the routes for this, but this is where I run into trouble.

I think it makes sense to do

resources :employees do
  resource :department
  resources :skills
end

however, I also want to be able to create skills and departments independently. I only need to be able to ‘hook up’ a department and a skill to an employee. The routes, like this, make sense (/employees/:id/skills, /employees/:id/department), but like I said, I would like to be able to do

/departments
/skills
/skills/new

etc..

I could do

EmployeeList::Application.routes.draw do

  resources :departments
  resources :skills

  resources :employees do
    resource :department
    resources :skills
  end
end

and this provides me with the routes I want, but it looks like really bad practice having the resources listed twice in my routes.rb file. How should I do this?

Answer 1

if, as you wrote “I also want to be able to create skills and departments independently. I only need to be able to ‘hook up’ a department and a skill to an employee.” then this is clearly not a case for nested resources imho. Nested Resources can only exist “within” their “surrounding” resource. A simple 1:n relation with belongs_to and has_many should be what you want, thus in routes.rb:

EmployeeList::Application.routes.draw do
  resources :departments
  resources :skills
  resources :employees
end