Routing nested resources in Rails 3

Question

I have a pretty common case for nested routes, I feel like, that looks something like this (in some sort of pseudonotation):

'/:username/photos' => Show photos for User.find_by_username '/photos' => Show photos for User.all 

In a nutshell: I have users. They have photos. I want to be able to show their photos on their page. I also want to be able to show all photos, regardless of the user. I'd like to keep my routes RESTful and using the built-in resource methods feels like the right way to do it.

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Option 1 for doing this is to have PhotosController#index use a conditional to check which params are given and get the list of photos and set the view (different for a user's photos than for all photos). It's even easy to route it:

resources :photos, :only => [:index] scope ':/username' do   resources :photos end 

Boom. It'd seem like Rails was setup for this. After the routes, though, things get more complicated. That conditional back in the PhotosController#index action is just getting more and more bloated and is doing an awful lot of delgation. As the application grows and so do the number of ways I want to show photos, it is only going to get worse.

Option 2 might be to have a User::PhotosController to handle user photos, and a PhotosController to handle showing all photos.

resources :photos, :only => [:index] namespace :user, :path => '/:username' do   resources :photos end 

That generates the following routes:

           photos GET    /photos(.:format)                    {:action=>"index", :controller=>"photos"}       user_photos GET    /:username/photos(.:format)          {:action=>"index", :controller=>"user/photos"}                   POST   /:username/photos(.:format)          {:action=>"create", :controller=>"user/photos"}    new_user_photo GET    /:username/photos/new(.:format)      {:action=>"new", :controller=>"user/photos"}   edit_user_photo GET    /:username/photos/:id/edit(.:format) {:action=>"edit", :controller=>"user/photos"}        user_photo GET    /:username/photos/:id(.:format)      {:action=>"show", :controller=>"user/photos"}                   PUT    /:username/photos/:id(.:format)      {:action=>"update", :controller=>"user/photos"}                   DELETE /:username/photos/:id(.:format)      {:action=>"destroy", :controller=>"user/photos"} 

This works pretty well, I think, but everything is under a User module and I feel like that might end up causing problems when I integrate it with other things.

Questions

• Does anybody have experience with something like this?
• Can anybody share a better way of handling this?
• Any additional pros and cons to consider with either of these options?

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Update: I've gone ahead implementing Option 2 because it feels cleaner allowing Rails' logic to work rather than overriding it. So far things are going well, but I also needed to rename my namespace to :users and add an :as => :user to keep it from clashing with my User model. I've also overridden the to_param method on the User model to return the username. Path helpers still work this way, too.

I'd still appreciate feedback on this method. Am I doing things the expected way, or am I misusing this functionality?

Answer 1

Have you considered using a shallow nested route in this case?

Shallow Route Nesting At times, nested resources can produce cumbersome URLs. A solution to this is to use shallow route nesting:

resources :products, :shallow => true do   resources :reviews end 

This will enable the recognition of the following routes:

/products/1 => product_path(1) /products/1/reviews => product_reviews_index_path(1) /reviews/2 => reviews_path(2)