So we've got a setup that has a remote API that we're accessing using HyperactiveResource (an extended version of ActiveResource). Now, I'm using Rails to simulate the remote API (for the purposes of testing), and I've come across some annoying behaviour.
One issue is that standard rails routing for a RESTful interface will direct a badly-constructed (or non-existent) URL to a real action... let me demonstrate thus:
Real member path: /users/1.xml Routed to: :controller => 'users', :action => 'show', :id => '1'
Real named collection path: /users/count.xml Routed to: :controller => 'users', :action => 'count'
Non-existent path: /users_party_on.xml Routed to: "Bad Request" handler
Non-existent path2: /users/party_on.xml Routed to: :controller => 'users', :action => 'show', :id => 'party_on'
If I called the last URL with curl, I'd expect to be routed to the "Bad request" handler and receive some sort of error-like http-status and an XML message explaining that no route exists or something similar... what I get instead is a horrible big *html* page telling me it couldn't find the user with an id of "party_on" (unsurprisingly).
So what do I want to have happen? I'd rather this stuff was caught in the router. It'd be nice if there were a way to tell the router that your :controller/:action/:id is only valid for a certain formatting of the :id field. If anybody out there on teh Intarwebs knows how to do that, please tell me now!
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to do this... and in any case, the router/dispatcher also doesn't seem to return XML to an XML-request... it only seems to know how to handle HTML-based errors (by spitting back the public error pages[1]).
So instead, what I need is to return a "URL not found"-style xml error at the appropriate time.
Most of my controllers have a "find_" function on the member-functions (ie just @thing = Thing.find(paramd[:id])). Now, since the bad URLs tend to converge on the "show" action - this seems as good a place to put a bad-request filter as any. I'll also incorporate it with the 404-code that also seems missing when a doesn't exist (or is not accessible by this person).
So this calls for a helper-method as below, as a hack to fix this lack of proper routing.
# convenience method for extracting the expected model name from the
# controller name
# Note: expects the model to be rails-standard eg "ThingsController"
# should map to the Thing model
def model_name
self.controller_name.singularize.camelize
end
# use this to skip out early and return better http status codes for XML
# requests.
#
def find_thing
the_id = params[:id]
# ids should be numeric. If they're not - we accidentally got through
# the router with an unrecognised action - because Railsy named-routes
# that *don't* exist, look like the "show" action with a bad id.
if !the_id.blank? && !the_id.to_i.is_a?(Numeric)
# skip out with a 400 early...
respond_to do |format|
format.xml do
return render :xml => 'Error: URL not recognised', :status => :bad_request
end
end
end
begin
thing = model_name.constantize.find(the_id.to_i)
rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
# skip out with a 404 early...
respond_to do |format|
format.xml do
return render :xml => 'Error: resource not found', :status => :not_found
end
end
end
thing
end
Due to how controller before_filters work[2], you should use this code thus:
class UsersController < ApplicationController
before_filter :find_user, :except => [:new, :create, :index, :count]
# actions all go here
# ...
protected
def find_user
@user = find_thing
end
end
Caveat: if you have non-standard naming of models/controller - the model_name.constantize will not work... so you may want to modify this to pass in an optional klass param.
Notes:
[1] and when exactly are they going to make these into templates so we can use the standard layout rather than hand-coding it for each one?
[2] ie, I'm too slack to figure out exactly how to do: @thingy = in a block passed to the before_filter command. Again - if you know how, let me know.
