Best way to "design" the controllers?

[JoL]

I'm about making a design for my page but before moving on I would like to here some opinions about how you deal with controllers.
Is it best to not have to many controllers?

My first idea was to have the following:

• admin_controller (for admin pages, limited access)
• public_controller (for public pages)
• authorize_controller (dealing with the login/logout stuff)

This seems clean and simple. The disadvantage with this solution is that the public and the admin controll might become big.
The advantage that I can see is that it easy to see which controller to updated when adding new features.
Is this a good way to build up the site? As it is now, the controllers are flexible.

The other way I have been thinking of is to have more specific controller, for example:

• admin_user
• admin_ news

And so on...

How do you do when you develop, and why?

[Luke Redpath]

You can group your controllers into modules, say Admin::UserController, which lives in app/controllers/admin/user_controller.rb

I think you should keep your controllers as small as possible. They should focus on a specific area of functionality, the basis of any good class design, and controllers are just classes.

[JoL]

That seems like a good idea. I tried it earlier today but I couldn't find any way to access the page.

app/controllers/admin/user_controller.rb:
http://mypage/admin/user/

User is okey because it is a controller. The admin i different though because it is a folder. Do I need to have a admin controller that redirects the request to the folder admin in my controller folder?

[Fenrir2]

Do you get an error message?

http://mypage/admin/user/

Means that you load Admin::UserController.

Do you get any error messages?

I would implement this in another way. I would have one controller for users: UsersController which has several methods, some of them are public, others are admin-only. You can find more information here: http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/chapter/49#page142

[JoL]

Interesting I will look on that too.

I get some kind of routing error. It's seems that it finds the controller but fails on loading it?

I try to access it by:
http://mypage/test/mytest

Test is not a controller it's a folder in my controller folder.
mytest is a controller in the folder test mentioned above.

LoadError in <controller not set>#<action not set>

Already loaded file './script/../config/../app/controllers/test/mytest_controller.rb' but 'MytestController' was not set, perhaps you need to rename './script/../config/../app/controllers/test/mytest_controller.rb'?

RAILS_ROOT: ./script/../config/..
Application Trace | Framework Trace | Full Trace

So it finds it but then something strange happens. Any idea how to get it to work?

[JoL]

No clue, or is it impossible to have folders in the controller folder?

[Luke Redpath]

What is the name of the class in mytest_controller.rb? It should be Test::MytestController.

[JoL]

Thanks, now it work just perfectly!