Rails nested resources for all members of an outer resource

user_2672869 0
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Let's say I have a routes file like this:

resources :books do
  resources :authors
end

So if I want to display the authors of a particular book, that's easy:

/books/1/authors

But what if I wanted to display the authors of all the books? I want something like this:

/books/all/authors

or:
/books/authors

Canonically, I assume it's just /authors but I'm curious if there's another way that's considered standard practice.

EDIT

To clarify, I want routes that look roughly like this:

/books/1/authors
/books/all/authors

So that the route doesn't look dramatically different for when I'm looking at authors for book 1 vs. all book authors, and I want to differentiate displaying authors outside of the context of books vs. with the context of books. So, simply having a resources :authors and a AuthorsController#index does not solve my question.

(Let's assume I don't want to have a /views/authors/index.html file)

ruby-on-rails
2 Answers

If you want to have something like /authors Then apart from your existing routes you can have a separate setup

routes.rb

resources :books do
  resources :authors
end
resources :authors

authors_controller.rb

def index
  @authors = Author.all # or Author.where(<CONDITIONS for search sort>)
end

And you can add respective views. This will give you good control.

Further to follow DRY principle, you can create a partial as authors/_index.html.haml (or .erb) and reuse same for /books/1/authors i.e. authors of a particular book.

Edits: If you do not want a separate controller, then you can distinguish on id param while finding authors collection.

# books/authors_controller.rb
def index
  @authors = params[:id] == 'all' ? Author.all : Book.find(params[:id]).authors
end
user_98385920

In that case inside the index method of authors add this code @authors = Author.all

As simple as it is

user_20421760
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