controllers

Ruby on Rails Controllers

Be RESTful as possible

Ruby on Rails supports RESTful and creating other actions that are outside the standard makes the understanding and maintenance, so it's a good idea to create specific controllers and use the REST methods. For example: An approval routine for a comment.

# Instead of this...
class CommentsController < ApplicationController
  def approve
    @comment.approve!
  end
end

# ...You should do this.
class ApproveCommentsController < ApplicationController
  def update
    @comment.approve!
  end
end

And, configure routes to ApproveCommentsController be nested of CommentsController. For details see the Ruby on Rails Guides.

If it won't be possible for some reason, write a good methods's documentation for these actions and use member or collection in the routes.rb:

# ...You should do this.
resources :comments, only: [:index, :show] do
  member do
    put :approve
    put :disapprove
  end
end

Keep clear and simple

• Use plataformatec/responders gem to dry up your Rails app (3.2+).
• Set respond_to in the ApplicationController.
• Use respond_with in actions.
• Set the flash messages in the Flash Responder's. For details see Flash Responder Manual.
• Use private methods and before_action to help to mantain controllers clean
• Use before filter to ensure access of users, or similar.
• Use the :show action only if you need to show some important information that does not fit in the index. Or if you need something more complex to be displayed.
• Escape from actions show that show the same thing as the :index.