I’m a Rails newbie who need advice on strategy for routing and such for some Rails attributes…my very first hand-made attributes. What I have works, but I’m pretty sure there’s a better way to do it. A sample user show page is viewable here. The repo is here.

I just finished Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial, which has a User model with the usual name, email, and password attributes. Then I figured I’d add a title and a description for the person. These seemed like User attributes, but I didn’t want them to be edited on /users/<id>/edit but instead on /users/<id>, which is associated with get user_path(<id>). But I went ahead and did the following.

Relevant routes:

  resources :users do     member do       post  'reactivate'         # Resends the activation email.       patch 'update_description' # Posts title & description.     end   end 

First question: Should I put title and description in a new model, e.g., a Profile model? (Then I guess the Profile belongs_to the User?) If not, should I have separate paths and actions for updating title and description? If I don’t have a separate model, I guess I should have separate paths, but the reason I had only one path and action is that it seemed implausible that there would be a separate action for every data field on the site.

My controller action, Users#update_description, is embarrassingly long and need refactoring, and it was actually when I sat down to refactor it that I decided to go back to the drawing board (and get help here):

  # Handles user's posted title and description.   def update_description     @user = User.find(params[:id])     # For smart message, first check if user had a title.     old_title = @user.title     # For smart message, first check if user had a description.     old_desc = @user.description     if title_desc_params[:title]       # And clear out any bad titles.       session[:bad_title] = nil       # Save title, if present.       if title_desc_params[:title].present?         # Attempt to save; if failed, flash with warning.         begin           @user.update_attributes!(title: title_desc_params[:title])         rescue ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid           flash[:warning] = "Unable to save. (Too long?)"           session[:bad_title] = title_desc_params[:title]         end       elsif old_title         @user.update_attributes!(title: nil)         flash[:info] = "Title deleted."       end     end     # Same logic as before, now for description.     if title_desc_params[:description]       # And clear out any bad descriptions.       session[:bad_desc] = nil       # Save description, if present.       if title_desc_params[:description].present?         # Attempt to save; if failed, flash with warning.         begin           @user.update_attributes!(description: title_desc_params[:description])         rescue ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid           flash[:warning] = "Unable to save. (Too long?)"           session[:bad_desc] = title_desc_params[:description]         end       elsif old_desc         @user.update_attributes!(description: nil)         flash[:info] = "Description deleted."       end     end     # Make sure two different [:success] flashes work! Probably not!     redirect_to "/users/#{@user.id}"   end 

In the User model, there are just these validations, nothing else:

  validates :title, length: { maximum: 255 }   validates :description, length: { maximum: 13_000 } # ~2000 words 

If you want to see the view, that needs refactoring too…it’s here.

All advice very gratefully accepted, but the main thing I’m interested in is how to do the routing and controller actions for this. And was it OK/normal in Rails to put some field editing there on a show page like that?