Service Crud

The service_crud gem: A simple mixin for adding crud actions for a RESTful, ActiveResource style service (xml and json).

This gem works with Rails 3.

$ cd /path/to/your/rails3/app
$ echo "gem service_crud" >> Gemfile
$ bundle install

Let's suppose we have a "Book" model, and we want to create XML and JSON RESTful services for it. Simple:

First, go to your routes.rb file and add the following route:

resources :books

Next, create the following controller in RAILS_ROOT/app/books_controller.rb:

class BooksController
  include ServiceCrud
end

That's it. You can now GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE books through the standard RESTful urls.

Sometimes you need to do a little extra work on your data before/after you create/update/destroy. And sometimes that can't be pushed down to the ORM layer. For example, suppose we want to set the :updated_by property on our model to the current_user. We could simply:

class BooksController
  include ServiceCrud
  before_update :set_updated_by

  private
  def set_updated_by(model)
    model.update_by = current_user
  end
end

ServiceCrud supports the following callbacks: before_create, after_create, before_update, after_update, before_destroy, and after_destroy.

The service_crud library will look at the controller name and try to guess the model (e.g., "BooksController" -> "Book").

If your controller name doesn't match your model, call the model method:

class MyBooksController
  include ServiceCrud
  model Book
end

Similarly, on POST or PUT, service_crud assumes that the top-level node of the XML or JSON is the lowercased, underscored, singularized symbol of your model name.

If that's not the case for your service, call the model_attribute_root class method:

class BooksController
  include ServiceCrud
  model_attribute_root :my_book
end

The service_crud library assumes an ActiveRecord ORM by default. It also, out of the box, supports the couchrest_model ORM for couchdb. To use couchrest_model, simply:

class BooksController
  include ServiceCrud
  orm_methods! ServiceCrud::CouchRest::Model
end

The default ORM methods are:

module ServiceCrud
  module DefaultOrm
    def all; :all; end
    def new; :new; end
    def find; :find; end
    def destroy; :destroy; end
    def update_attributes; :update_attributes; end
    def save; :save; end
  end
end

If you're using an ORM other than ActiveRecord or CouchRest::Model, and some or all of your ORM's method names differ from ActiveRecord's, then simply create a module that redefines one or more DefaultOrm methods. For example, suppose we create our own ORM, MoonOrm, and our method for finding records is lookup instead of find. Then we'd simply:

module MoonOrmMethods
  def find; :lookup; end
end

Then, in our controller:

class BooksController
  include ServiceCrud
  orm_methods! MoonOrmMethods
end