Question

I’m having an issue coming up with a good way to do the following. I have a very generic Org model and User model. Org has_many :users, and User belongs_to :org.

I am trying to find a way of showing a list of users that is not restricted by Org, but also show a list of User’s that is restricted by Org. I know I could nest the routes, and just have two different routes like

map.resources :users
map.resources :orgs, :has_many => :users

The problem is that they both go back to the same actions in the User controller. The controller code starts to get very messy because I am having to check for the existence of an :org_id param. Then I have to decide whether to return the normal results of a find call on User, or a find that is scoped to an Org. I’m not sure what the best solution is here, or what the best practice is. If someone with some knowledge on this could please enlighten me, it would be great.

Answer 1

Another way of doing this without a plugin would be to use named_scope. You can create a named scope in User that filters by org_id if it’s not empty.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :org
  named_scope :by_org, lambda{|org| org.blank? ? {} : { :conditions => ['org_id = ?', org] }}
end

And in the controller just use your named scope. That way if you eventually supply more filter options in the controller you don’t need to duplicate them:

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @users = User.by_org(params[:org_id]).all
    ...
  end
end