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Ruby

Posted by Damian Sieczkowski
Damian Sieczkowski
9,730 Points

JSON REST structure for rails app

Hi,

I'm building a iOS mobile application with a rails backend. At first when I started building the API I created a separate namespace for it and the controllers would respond with "render: json." Now, knowing a little more about routes I realize that I can set a respond_to and respond_with in the controllers thus eliminating the need for any separation. Assuming that at some point there will also be a web application along with other mobile clients is this the best approach? Will this offer more flexibility for programmers who may want to refactor the code later or vice versa?

1 Answer

Kyle Daugherty
Kyle Daugherty
16,441 Points

I would recommend sticking with the separate namespace. Take a look at this RailsCasts:

REST API versioning

Damian Sieczkowski
Damian Sieczkowski
9,730 Points

That's a great video - thanks! It addressed all of my questions. I kind of took out the namespace from my routes but I will put it back now & add a version as well. For anyone referring to this question... The only thing I did not notice in the video is that you can use capital letters for API when specifying the module in your controllers if you would like by adding this to config/initializers/inflections.rb -

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections(:en) do |inflect|
 inflect.acronym 'API'
end

and also have your path set to "/" instead of "/api/v#/" if you're using a subdomain already by adding the path option in your route ie - 

  namespace :api, path: "/", defaults: { format: "json" }, constraints: { subdomain: "api" } do
Damian Sieczkowski
Damian Sieczkowski
9,730 Points

Any chance you can share your thoughts on this question https://teamtreehouse.com/forum/authorization-for-rails-api?