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Finished first draft

Finished first draft. Might add some examples in a separate file.

It's probably my fault we have this in our code, so I'll just make the first step to stop us from doing it in the future.

I started to put queries in before_actions because it looked DRY to me. For example instead of writing

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @user = User.find(params[:id])
  end

  def edit
    @user = User.find(params[:id])
  end
end

I wrote

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  before_action :find_user, only: [:show, :edit]

  def show
  end

  def edit
  end

  private

  def find_user
    @user = User.find(params[:id])
  end
end

There are many problems with this.

• It's not really more DRY then calling the method in each action, instead of the method names you have to list the actions in the before_filter.
• They abstract the flow of the action from the developer.
• And they elevate the live time of the variables.

I found a good blog post, which get's into this in way more depth - before_action an anti-pattern?.

For me, the ideal would probably be to use the before_action as they were first intended as a filter for authorisation and such (hence the name before_filter) and move the queries into the actions.

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @user = find_user
  end

  def edit
    @user = find_user
  end

  private

  def find_user
    User.find(params[:id])
  end
end

Any thoughts?

We should decide on a standard for all our JSON APIs.

The two big ones would be JSON API and HAL.

As the JSON API site points out:

By following shared conventions, you can increase productivity, take advantage of generalized tooling, and focus on what matters: your application.

For pagination we already looked at HAL but I think JSON API seems a lot more Rails-ish and is designed by the creator of Ember.js, which would probably make Ember easier if we were use it in the future.

Furthermore, from the JSON API site: Why not use the HAL specification?.

Finished first draft.

Finished first draft.

Finished first draft.

Finished first draft.