ingoweiss / resource_awareness

Makes information about a Rails application's resources (as defined via the 'resource(s)' routing DSL methods) available via Rails.application.resources

resource_awareness

resource_awareness makes information about a Rails application’s resources (as defined via the ‘resource/s’ routing DSL methods) available via Rails.application.resource_definitions. Each resource object encapsulates information such as the resource’s name, home route, path and the controller that is handling it:

attribute	example
id	post_comments
name	comments
singular_name	comment
home_route	[the ‘post_comments’ named route]
path_prefix	/posts/:post_id
path	/posts/:post_id/comments
prefix_parameters	[:post_id]
controller_path	comments
controller	CommentsController

Resources can be retrieved by id using bracket syntax:

Rails.application.resource_definitions['post_comments']

Controllers get a resource_definition instance method to controllers returning the resource they are handling, if any.

Resources have a to_xml method that makes it trivial to expose an application’s resource as a resource in turn:

# config/routes.rb
resources :resources

# app/controllers/resources_controller.rb
respond_to :xml

def index
  respond_with Rails.application.resource_definitions
end

# At this point, resource information is available at /resources.xml

Lastly, resource_awareness adds a rake resources tasks that lists an application’s resources, just like rake routes does for routes

Please note that resource_awareness is experimental and interfaces are likely to change. I very much welcome suggestions or comments!

Installation

gem install resource_awareness

Copyright © 2010 Ingo Weiss, released under the MIT license

resource_awareness's Issues

Error if collection route not present

ra causes an exception if you explicitly prevent the creation of a collection route for a plural resource (via :only => [:show] for example)

Should be able to handle multiple resources with same controller

resource_awareness is exactly what I've been looking for for a long long time but I think it could be 1000% more useful if it supported multiple resource mappings per controller. Example - I have ClubsController and PeopleController. Clubs and People should both be able to create/edit Pages that belong to either a Club or Person. The PagesController should know (via resource_awareness) whether or not it was called from a Club or Person and which Club or Person it is (probably for assigning a polymorphic field).