Introduction
Chainable APIs are great. There's no denying it. With Rails 3, ActiveRecord got a chainable API. But not so for ActiveResource, that red-headed stepchild of the Rails 'verse.
Installation
It's a gem. Install it.
$ gem install chaingang
Usage
First, include ChainGang in your ActiveResource::Base derived client class.
class Article < ActiveResource::Base
self.site = 'http://blah.com'
include ChainGang
end
Then, go wild:
# find all the articles /articles/published.xml?author=moonmaster9000&genre=sci-fi
@articles = Article.find(:all).from(:published).where.author?("moonmaster9000").and.genre?("sci-fi")
# at this point, @articles hasn't actually made the network call yet.
@articles.each do |article| # now it's made the network call
puts article.title
end
# or, find a specific article by id, but add a "?preview_data=true" onto the query string.
@article = Article.find('some-article-id').where.preview_data?(true)
# or, find the first article by moonmaster9000 and get the title; /articles.xml?author=moonmaster9000
@article = Article.find(:first).where.author?("moonmaster9000").title
# to specifiy the reqeust format, you can use format() method, which temporarily set Article.format for this request.
@article = Article.find(:first).where.author?("moonmaster9000").format(:json) # or :xml