Imagine a web application to track assignments for reading multiple books at once. For instance, if books A & B have 16 chapters and book C has 32 chapters, then to complete all three books in 16 weeks a person would need to read 1 chapter per week for books A & B and 2 chapters per week for book C.
When a user creates their own reading plan, the application would copy the reading plan template to create actual assignments for each week. Each assignment would contain a due date based on the user provided start date. Each assignment would also be linked on a one-to-many basis to each chapter to be read that week, so that the user can track their progress on a per chapter basis for each of the four chapters required to be read each week.
Questions
- Should I provide the Create CRUD resource for assignments, even though users won’t create individual assignments?
- Should I just provide the Create CRUD resource for a reading plan, which would then go through and copy the template assignments to that user’s reading plan assignments?
This is a Ruby on Rails 3.1 application.
Unless you are really strapped for time/resources, I’d suggest to provide direct CRUD functionalities, even if they may perhaps restricted to some admin/superuser profile.
No matter how brilliantly designed, an application sooner or later will need some quick&dirty bypass functionality to directly amend data at a lower level, in my experience.