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PORails Routes/Controller/Directory Structure design question
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copied!<p>I have a design question where I would appreciate a thoughtful response.</p> <p>Let's say you have a simple application (for example's sake) that has a User, Company and Theme model. A Company <code>has_one</code> Theme and <code>has_many</code> Users.</p> <p>Administrators (a User) can fully manage Companies, Users and Themes - the whole REST stack, in addition to a few other actions too. Administrators are expected to do things to all 3 of these resources that other user roles cannot do.</p> <p>We also have a Company role. This role can edit their own Company, as well as select a Theme from the ones the admin-user added as nice defaults, or they can just make their own theme.</p> <p>Companies can also add/edite/delete users, but only for their company. These pages will have different views and they'll have different behaviour from admins - some overlaps, but some things will be restricted while others will be added.</p> <p>Now, here we have some non-trivial design choices, and I would like to know what the best-practice is.</p> <p><strong>PART 1</strong></p> <p>In Rails, it makes sense to have <code>resources :users, :companies, :themes</code> for the administrators and probably <code>resource :company, :theme, :users</code> for the Company users.</p> <p>But of course, we run into some naming conflicts here - both singular and plural - so we might want to try something like <code>resource :my_company, :my_theme, :my_users</code> to separate them? Or is there a better solution?</p> <p>Furthermore, a theme is just a component of a company, so maybe we want to nest them?</p> <pre><code>:resource :my_company do :resource :theme :resources :users end </code></pre> <p>This works okay, but it could be confusing as to which UsersController we are referring to... no? This is really sticky and I would love to know how to deal with this. Do you have 1 controller, or 2? What do you name them?</p> <p>So this would be an example:</p> <pre><code>http://myapp.com/my_company/theme/edit http://myapp.com/my_company/users/1/delete </code></pre> <p>Company users also might want the list of themes via ajax, so is it correct for them to call:</p> <pre><code>http://myapp.com/themes.json </code></pre> <p>?</p> <p>Is this how to approach this situation, or is there a better way?</p> <p><strong>PART 2</strong></p> <p>Also, what should your directory structure look? Should you have controllers separated by user role?</p> <pre><code>/app/controllers/admin/companies_controller.rb /app/controllers/admin/themes_controller.rb /app/controllers/admin/users_controller.rb /app/controllers/company/my_company_controller.rb /app/controllers/company/theme_controller.rb /app/controllers/company/users_controller.rb </code></pre> <p>Or is there better ways to handle this?</p> <p>It seems weird that users_controller is duplicated 2x and that there is a minor difference between Theme and Themes.</p> <p>I would really appreciate a thoughtful response on this. Thanks!</p>

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