Gears Within Gears

ResourceFull integrates with ActionController to provide a comprehensive RESTful resource modeling and querying framework. It provides parameter queryability, paging, sorting, separation of controller concerns, multiple formats (HTML, XML, JSON), CRUD access permissions, and API metadata surrounding the resource itself. It’s opinionated but is intended to provide you with as much as possible without limiting your ability to customize its behavior.

This plugin was extracted from a series of Rails projects intended to serve as the services tier of a series of loosely-coupled applications built in a style reminiscent of the RADAR architecture.

ResourceFull lives on Github at http://github.com/bguthrie/resource_full/.

GOALS

The major distinguishing features of ResourceFull are:

• Queryability: the ability to designate certain parameters as queryable, and map them to columns and SQL queries in the underlying model. These queries chain together multiple named or unnamed scopes and can be used either for a SQL SELECT or SELECT COUNT. This functionality may be moved into a separate plugin in the future.
• Pagination and orderability: it automatically responds to requests for limit, offset, order_by, and order_dir.
• Implementation: Default implementations for HTML, XML, and JSON controller requests.
• API documentation: ResourceFull-enabled Rails apps are able to provide automatic documentation of the resources they expose, up to a point. (This is enabled in large part by the queryability functionality and other resource-level descriptors.) It’s my hope that this can eventually be consumed by a Rails resource registrar that acts as the single source of record for multiple REST engines within an organization.

EXAMPLE

This allows for the following:

/users/bguthrie.xml
/users?name=Guthrie
/users?email_address=gmail
/users.xml?city=Chicago&name=Brian,Paul,Alicia&order_by=city&order_dir=asc
/users.xml?limit=10&offset=30
/users/bguthrie/addresses

>> UsersController.to_xml
=> "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n\n  ..."

API DOCUMENTATION

To enable ResourceFull to document your resources at /resources.xml and /resources//routes.xml, add map.api to your routes.rb file.