bguthrie / resource_full

DSL to build, expose, and document ActiveResource-friendly RESTful APIs.

ResourceFull¶ ↑

ResourceFull provides a fully-compliant ActiveResource server implementation built on ActionController. Additionally, it provides RESTful 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. Unless overridden, it uses Rails’ default to_xml and to_json methods to provide object serialization, which ActiveResource expects but many REST clients will not.

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¶ ↑

class UsersController < ResourceFull::Base
  identified_by :username, :unless => lambda { |id| id =~ /^[0-9]+$/ }

  queryable_with :city, :state, :from => :address
  queryable_with :name, :columns => [:first_name, :last_name]
  queryable_with :email_address, :fuzzy => true
  queryable_with :is_active, :scope => :active

  orderable_by :city, :from => :address

  responds_to :html
  responds_to :xml, :only => [:read, :update]
end

class AddressesController < ResourceFull::Base
  nests_within :users
  queryable_with :city, :state
end

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<resource>\n  <parameters type=\"array\"/>..."

API DOCUMENTATION¶ ↑

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

CONTRIBUTORS¶ ↑

• Vijay Aravamudhan

• Dirk Elmendorf

LICENSE¶ ↑

(The MIT License)

Copyright © 2010 Brian Guthrie

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.