Non-CRUD Controller Actions

Question

This might seem like a n00b question, but I am trying to break some of my bad practice that I may have adopted using MVC, so I hope you can help me out

So, imagine I want to do something like "Upload CSV And Parse It", it doesn't seem obvious to me to fit it into the CRUD pattern... I am not interacting with the DB, so i don't need add or update or delete, but I still want to be able to use the action in a meaningful way from different views. Thus, it is "ok" to just an action called "UploadCSV" and have it be accessible via a URL such as "/data/uploadcsv"

Your thoughts are much appreciated!

Tom

Answer 1

It sounds like you are talking about RESTful ideas (having actions called index, create, new, edit, update, destroy, show).

In MVC you can call an action largely whatever you want (so yes, you can call it uploadcsv if you want). If you want it fit RESTful principles you might want to think about what the action is doing (for example is a data upload essentially a create or an update function) and name it using one of the RESTful action names.