Say that I have a Customers and an Orders tables, where each Customer may have many Orders.
Since in rails we are encouraged to represent these resources in a RESTful style, each of our resources, will respond to the following actions
So far, it all is very fair and plain. But now say that each time i open the show page of my Customer, i want to show a detail table containing all his/her orders.
This is a very common need, but doesn't this "unclean" the correctness of restful approach?
Is there some workaround, like "mashing" the two resources at a "view level", leaving them separate from the rest point of view?
Rails' default conventions ensure a RESTful application, and the only way this might become non-restful would be if you used custom-names on the routes, in which case you would have you add an extra bit of code to specify the HTTP method.
So, to accomplish what you're suggesting, at the view level, you may have something like this:
app/views/customers/show.html.erb
....
<% if customer.orders.any? %> #the orders method is provided on `customer` by defining the `has_many` and `belong_to` associations
<%= render @orders $>
And you would make sure to define @orders in the show action of the customers_controller.rb file.
This not only is RESTful, but also works within Rails' default conventions.