Is it bad practice to have two controllers for one model in Ruby on Rails?

Question

I have a model that gets treated differently by a parameter it holds, for example its like a character table, which also is used for non player characters, since they share all the same attributes. So it would have a Boolean or integer that would indicate if it was a player character or a non-player character. And non-player characters will be generated automatically with random status parameters and names.

Since the methods used for the two are radically different, I though it would be logical to have a different controller class for them, but that would make a single model have two different controllers, and feels somewhat odd.

Is this bad practice? Should I do all the coding in one controller?

Answer 1

It actually sounds to me like you should have two different models. If the way you interact with the objects is radically different, as you explained, then they really shouldn't be the same class. Ruby has a great way to deal with this case: Modules. You can use modules to create shared behaviors for objects. You can even store the non-player characters and characters in the same database table by overriding the ActiveRecord table name. For example:

module Character
  def decrease_hitpoints x
    ...
  end
  # other shared functionality can go here
end

class PlayerCharacter < ActiveRecord::Base
  set_table_name 'characters'
  include Character
end

class NonPlayerCharacter < ActiveRecord::Base
  set_table_name 'characters'
  include Character
end

In this example both PlayerCharacter and NonPlayerCharacter share the same table name and functionality defined in Character, but they are different objects.

Finally, it's totally fine to use two or more controllers for a single model, just as it's fine to build a controller that doesn't depend on a model at all.

Answer 2

This is completely OK. What you are describing is a task-based user interface, where you are more interested in capturing a work flow or process, as opposed to a simple CRUD or resource operation. Remember, the default setups in Rails are meant to be very basic. Feel free to expand on the basics.