[Brug-talk] Controllers owning controllers

[Thomas Richard]

Hey,

First of all, thanks for the reply Tom. Thought I wouldn't get any.

I've quickly drawn something in paint and put it online. You can find
the image here:
http://www.statsfreakz.net/images/ror.jpg

As you can see the 'smaller modules' like workhours and products are
shared between the bigger categories. They have exactly the same
functionality but I'd like to have the sidemenu render the options
that belong to their main category. So when you're working in the
projects page you get a sidebar with different options then when
you're working in the delivery page. I've currently set this up with
some routing and I'm thinking of writing a controller for every
smaller module so i can just put them on any page i want without
changing code.

I've added these routes to routes.rb
  map.connect ':dummy/:controller/:action/:id'
  map.connect ':dummy', :controller => 'redirector', :action => 'redirect'

Then the template application.rhtml reads out the dummy variable and
renders the correct sidebar (this code is put in a helper). I really
don't know if this is 'the rails way' but i couldn't come up with
another solution myself. This seems to work fine and didn't cost me
alot of time to set up. So i might stick to this unless someone has a
better idea.

Greetings
Thomas

2007/11/12, Tom Klaasen <tom at 10to1.be>:
> Hi Thomas,
>
> On 11/10/07, Thomas Richard <thomas9999 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hey Belgian Rubyists,
> >
> > I've just completed the book 'Agile web development in Rails' and I've
> > been playing around a bit before i start to work in my first real
> > rails application. Now while playing I came to a problem wich i might
> > be able to solve but if I'd do it my way it would break all the Rails
> > conventions the book was been telling about. So there should be a more
> > 'agile' solution to this problem.
> >
> > Let me try explain the problem:
> > The application would be build on a few big modules e.g: projects,
> > services, delivery's, stock, ...
> > Under these big modules I'd have a few smaller modules e.g: employees,
> > products, price requests, ...
>
>
> What do you understand under "module"? From your explanation, it seems that
> you consider one module as one web page.
>
>
> > The big problem now is that i would need to share the functionalirty
> > of these smaller modules between the bigger modules. The functions of
> > all the smaller modules should be exactly the same everywhere. It
> > probably has a simple solution but i can't seem to find one. The way
> > I'd try to solve the problem is making a controller for the projects,
> > services, .. modules , but i don't know how I'd have to handle the
> > smaller ones. I could put them in different rb files and require them
> > into the controllers but that just doesn't seem right.
>
>
> I'm still a bit lost here... How do the smaller modules belong to the bigger
> ones? Why are they put "everywhere"?
>
>
> > When i was thinking about the URI's i came to a possible second
> > solution. The URI's would have to look something like
> > app/projects/pricerequests/new
> > Now that gave me a new perspective on the case. I could actually put
> > the smaller modules into controllers and just use the greater modules
> > as dummies. They're just there to organize the smaller modules into
> > groups. Then again, i wouldn't know how i could get something like
> > this working in rails as this would screw up the way the view system
> > works?
> >
> > As you can probably see i found it hard to explain the problem but i
> > hope any of you can make something out of this. Would be nice of
> > someone wants to discuss about this with me (in private or not).
>
>
> A whiteboard (or a scrap or paper) would indeed be nice, I think. But please
> try to explain your problem a bit more here, I'd like to help. What does
> your application look like? How do you see the user flow? What are the
> relations between the modules?
>
> > I
> > hope questions like these are allowed in this mailing list ;)
>
>
> That's why this list is here in the first place, isn't it?
>
>
> --
> Tom Klaasen
> 10to1
>
>
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