Best way to do this RESTfully and right : Ruby on Rails

Question

This is probably easy but I'm a bit of a newbie on wrapping my head around these things sometimes.

Synopsis: I'm trying to make a checklist application that technicians go through and answer questions about what has been completed or done in the field. The technicians then submit this for review. The questions are created, managed, and updated by the managers.

UPDATE I'm a designer, so I naturally magnetize to PS. Here's a photo of the concept: http://screensnapr.com/u/a9k1ps.png

checklist model contains: header, subheader, question, and answer.

Everything is a string, except the answer field, which is an integer for a check box.

I'm not quite sure which RESTful page to start with after that though. I need the header displayed like this (in view), but editable/submittable through the check box all on one page.

This view has to DISPLAY the checklist and EDIT the checklist at the same time. The manager needs to be able to add new headers, subheaders, and questions, which the technicians can then answer.

<% @checklists.each do |checklist| %>
<h1> <%=h checklist.header %> </h1>
<h3> <%=h checklist.subheader %> </h3>
<ul>
   <li>
  <%=h checklist.question %>
  <% form_for @checklists do |f| %>
  <%= f.check_box("checklist", "answer") %>
  <% end %>
  </li>
</ul>
<% end %>

Would this work and would it best to stick this in the index or edit action? Would I be better doing a partial of some sort? nested_attributes? I'm a bit lost at this point because I'm trying to manage two actions (index, edit) within one file.

Answer 1

Without looking at this further, I'm willing to bet you want form_for checklist.question and POST to questions_controller, which would use the #update action.

Answer 2

If you want a manager to update/modify the checkboxes and the technicians to fill in the forms, you need a couple of extra tables. One containing the questions and one containing the values that are checked. Also, it seems better to split the controller into two, one for each user type:

For the manager part you can simply make a controller like any other controller: using the index action to show all questions and the edit/update/etc actions to modify them.

For the technician part you need to define a project table, containing some information about the project the technician is working on. And a checkboxes table containing the project_id and the checkbox_ids, in order to link the checkboxes to a certain project.

See A Guide to Active Record Associations for more information about creating associations between tables.