I have a CourseCategory model and a Course Model along with corresponding controllers course_categories and courses. A course belongs to a category and a category has many courses.
I want to have a page that shows courses in a particular category. Which controller does this function belong in? Should I nest these resources? Just looking for the best way to model this.
CourseCategories. Think of your URLs, thats the easiest way to make a decision like this:
example.com/course_categories/1
--or, better, use slugs for categories instead of ids and you'd get--
example.com/course_categories/awesome_courses/
However, it might be worthwhile to consider simple having a "categories" model rather than a "course_categories" model. Then you could nest categories under courses, and you'd get something like:
example.com/courses/categories/1 or example.com/courses/categories/hard
I would say you are going to be displaying a coursecategory listing - therefore would belong in the coursecategory controller.
You can add this so the courses controller and take a parameter saying which category to respond with.
Or, if it makes sense, you can make courses a nested attributed of course_categories. Then this will be the default behavior.
EDIT Since I gave the opposite answer of someone else. The first suggestion would let you
/courses?course_category=math
or
/courses/math
Then look for the course_category in the controller
The second idea would let you do
/math/courses
An alternative would be to do something like
routes.rb
resources :course_catgeories do
resources :courses
end
courses_controller.rb
def index
@course_category = CourseCategory.find(params[:course_category_id])
@courses = @course_category.courses
end
The logic here being, if you're listing courses for a category, then the conventional action for that is the index action. Except in this case, you're scoping the listing to a particular category. So if you think about it in those terms, I think this approach better models your domain.
This approach effectively produces the following routes:
/course_categories/ (category index page)
/course_categories/1 (category show page)
/course_categories/1/courses (course index page)
/course_categories/1/courses/1 (course show page)
