Question

I’m stuck figuring out the best practice…

I want to create a “following” system in a way that a user can follow a car (getting email updates when car price changes, etc). The part of implementation that’s giving me headaches is when I want to introduce lazy registration by only using email.

Everything needs to work as AJAX requests.

In the interface, there will be a button to trigger the follow action, which will check if the user is registered or not. If a user is logged in, create a new CarSubscription item, otherwise display a form where he could type his email address. Once submitted, the form should create a user with no password (if email exists, ask for the password and log in) and then it should create the relationship item.

The challenge here is to use redirection after submission of the form to the CREATE action of the CarSubscriptionController. Since I can’t redirect using POST I can’t simulate the CREATE or DESTROY action.

The non-RESTful solution would be to create 2 actions under cars_controller: follow and unfollow and let them do the logic of creating entries and deleting them. That would enable me to just store the request path and use it after the user enters their email and logs in.

How can I achieve what I want using RESTful resources?

After trying to describe my problem here, it seems it’s way too complicated and I am indeed very stuck… There are 3 different controllers and possibly 4 requests in this scenario.

Any help would be tremendously appreciated!

Please see my flow chart below:

Answer 1

Not an expert here, I don’t know if it’s the best solution, but what I have done in similar situation is :

1. In your controller, respond with javascript instead of redirecting the user
2. In your javascript file, use $.post(...) to issue a POST to your controller action
3. Et voilà!

You can also use ActiveResource to achieve this, but I actually never tried that solution : http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveResource/Base.html#label-Custom+REST+methods

Person.new(:name => 'Ryan').post(:register)

Hope this helps