Take a forum system, hypothetically. You have topics and posts
controllers which both contain the 7 default RESTful actions. Then you
realise "Oh, I want to add in a functionality that allows me to split
topics based on the positioning of certain posts". Ah! A conundrum! So
what do you do and where do you put it?
Well, since you're going to be splitting a *topic* based on *certain
posts* I would put this functionality not in the topics controller,
but the posts controller. The reason for this is because most likely
we're going to want to split a topic based on a particular post. How
we split it isn't really important right now. So we create a new
action called split in our posts controller which has two ways of
operating, first it will prompt a user how to split a post and then
it'll undertake the task. So firstly we add it to our routes.rb file:
map.resources :posts, :member => { :split => [:get, :post] }
Notice how we're specifying the :member option here, signifying we
only want a single post and then after that specifying an array of
methods that our action will respond to.
When we click the link to go to this split we'll assume that the user
gets prompted with a form on how they want to split the post (like, do
they want to split the topic with all the posts after this post,
before this post and if the new topic should include the post that is
our candidate) and then when they submit this form it undertakes the
actual splitting.
Now that's (what I'd like to think of as a) good example of adding a
"RESTful" action that's not one of "The Seven" to your controller.
A bad example would be going into the topics controller and adding
actions such as new_post, create_post, edit_post, etc. because post is
its own resource. The creation, listing, showing, editing and
destroying of separate resources should be kept separate.
Just a short description :)
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