!!! Refactor this shice. Seriously, this has devolved into some nasty-ass code.
Aims to provide a production quality Rest API to your Rails app, with the following features:
- whitelisting
- flexible xml formats with good defaults
- all resources are referred to by url and not by id; expose a "web of resources"
In order to make your models apiable add
apiable
to your model. Next, define which properties you want to export, so within the model write something like:
self.restful_publish(:name, :current-location, :pets)
Some example configurations:
restful_publish :name, :pets, :restful_options => { :expansion => :expanded } # default on level 1-2: expanded. default above: collapsed. restful_publish :name, :pets, :wallet => :contents, :restful_options => { :expansion => :expanded } # combined options and expansion rules restful_publish :name, :pets, :restful_options => { :collapsed => :pets } # collapsed pets, even though they are on the second level. restful_publish :name, :pets, :restful_options => { :expanded => [:pets, :wallet] } restful_publish :name, :pets, :restful_options => { :pets_page => 1, :pets_per_page => 100, :collapsed => :pets }
restful_publish :name, :person # expands person per default because it is on the second level. Does not expand person.pets.first.person, since this is higher than second level.
This format sticks to xml_simple, adding links as <association-name-restful-url> nodes of type "link".
Person.last.to_restful.serialize(:xml) results in something like...
Person.last.to_restful.serialize(:atom_like) results in something like...
Person.last.to_restful.serialize(:params) results in something like...
{:sex_attributes => {:sex=>"male"}, :current_location=>"Under a tree", :name=>"Joe Bloggs", :pets_attributes=> [ {:person_id=>1, :name=>nil} ] }
Use Restful.from_atom_like(xml).serialize(:hash) to convert from an atom-like formatted xml create to a params hash. Takes care of dereferencing the urls back to ids. Generally, use Restful.from_<serializer name>(xml) to get a Resource.
Serializing uses Rails 2.3 notation of nested attributes. For deserializing you will need Rails 2.3 for having nested attributes support and the respective model must have the
accepts_nested_attributes_for :<table name> set accordingly