Question

I’m trying to add a public API to my app to allow users to add items into my application through API calls.

I’m kind of confused though…..

I have this so far which outputs a great xml page with all our Model data so perfect….

def index   
  @events = Event.all
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html 
    format.xml  { render :xml => @events }
    format.json { render :json => @events }
  end
end

So I’m assuming I would be able to add that same respond_to block into the CREATE or NEW action (which one?) and get some form of API functionality there as well??? but I’m confused to how this whole process works…

For example if my Event model only had one field => name:string

How would I be able to add a record by webservice?

  ???? ==> curl http://localhost:3000/events[??????add??????]

Answer 1

See this post on using cURL to test REST applications.

Quoting:

-X [action]: Allows you to specify an HTTP action such as GET, POST, PUT or DELETE.
Example:

curl -X DELETE http://localhost:3000/books/1

-d [parameter]: Lets you set variables as if they were POSTed in a form to the URL. Note that this automatically makes the request a POST HTTP action type (no -X necessary).
Example:

curl -d "book[title]=Test" -d "book[copyright]=1998"
http://localhost:3000/books

-H [header]: Gives you the option of setting an HTTP header such as Content-Type or Accept. This is particularly useful for requesting text/xml as the Accept type.
Example:

curl -H "Accept: text/xml"
http://localhost:3000/books/sections/1