ControllerResources

A Rails engine providing a common DSL for fetching model resources in the controller and view layers. It leverages DecentExposure, StrongParameters and assumes an ActiveRecord-like DSL for querying model objects. ControllerResources does not assume any part of your stack, instead providing generic tools and extensions to ActionController which allow you to use the fetched resources however you want.

resource :post do
  permit :title, :category, :body, :is_published
end

...and not have to worry about where the posts and post methods come from. If you're used to working with DecentExposure, you'll know that we're just using the expose macro to set up these resources, and using the resource macro to populate what we expose and additionally what parameters to pass through.

You can establish DecentExposure configuration with the resource block by calling methods which do not exist on the Resource. All of these methods are passed down to DecentExposure:

expose :post, param: :post_id
resource :comment, ancestor: :post do
  permit :body, :user_id
end

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'controller_resources'

And run

$ bundle install

Usage

Define your resource in the controller, and you can use methods instead of instance variables to access the model object. No more writing finder methods!

class ItemsController < ApplicationController
  resource :item do
    permit :name, :user, :is_private
  end

  def index
    respond_with items
  end

  def show
    respond_with item
  end

  def create
    item.save
    respond_with item
  end
end

In your view, you can use methods instead of instance variables to access the model objects passed down into the template:

<%= user.name %>

Meta-Programming Capabilities

Since ControllerResources is programatically defining exposure methods for you, it also keeps references to the name given in the resource block so you can infer what kind of object you are using in your view. The model_name, collection_name and model / collection methods are included as helpers along with the rest of the exposure methods in your view as well as the controller.

For more, consult the RDoc Documentation

Contributing

Contributions to ControllerResources may be made using GitHub pull requests. You must include accompanying tests, and all tests must pass for any contribution to be considered.

NOTE: Running tests requires that you have PhantomJS installed.

To run tests:

$ bin/rake test

This will also use Rubocop to lint-check your code so it adheres to our style guide.

Releasing

All acceptance testing and final RubyGems.org releasing is performed automatically by Travis CI. When a new gem version needs to be released, one with push access to the repo can update the version by running the following Rake task, which will tag the latest version of the gem and push all commits to GitHub, where it will be picked up by Travis and auto-deployed to RubyGems:

$ bin/rake release

Compatibility

ControllerResources adheres to the Semantic Versioning standard for publishing new versions of the library. Bug fixes will be pushed in patch updates, while new features that maintain compatibility will be available in minor updates. Major updates are reserved for new features that break existing compatibility.

Ruby version support

This project will be tested against any version of MRI that is currently being supported by the Ruby core team. It is not currently being tested on JRuby or Rubinius. For more information on what versions of Ruby we're testing, see Travis CI.