problem with project MVC structure

Question

in my project i have about 20 html forms with many different <input>'s. This <input>'s are unique in every form and they don't repeated between them. For each form there is a script which get data from form, generate specific file, and push it to the browser. and that's it. no databases, admin, logins/passwords and other usual web-app stuff.

so for example in php, project structure can be something like this:

forms/

------->form1/

--------------->index.html

--------------->script/

----------------------->index.php

------->form2/

--------------->index.html

--------------->script/

----------------------->index.php

and so on. It's quite clear and it makes pretty urls like:

www.website.com/forms/form1

but in Ruby-on-Rails there is a MVC pattern. And i have no idea how to organize structure with project like that. How to make it right? I should not to make 20 different controllers after all, right?

Answer 1

Yes you do make 20 controllers. In much the same way as you have 20 script/index.php files in your PHP structure. The rails structure would look something like this.

app/
    controllers/
        form1s_controller
        form2s_controller
        .....
        formns_controller
    view/
        form1/
            new.html.erb
        form2/
            new.html.erb
        ......
        formn/
            new.html.erb
        layouts/
            application.html.erb

Where the controllers have a method for each action that you want to perform e.g. new, edit etc

The layouts/application.html.erb file will contain all of the markup that is consistent across all of your pages.

Finally, don't try and fight the structure. It is there to enable minimal code because of convention, if you try and create your own structures you will create a world of pain.

Answer 2

Since there is no database backend for the forms, i would create one FormsController, with 20 methods (form1, form2, form3, ...).

Your urls would then look almost the same \forms\form1, \forms\form2 ...

Even if you would use 20 controllers, there are many ways in ruby to remove duplicate code. So even in a normal MVC, i have had applications with 140 models, and likewise as many controllers, most of these controllers had only one line and the views were completely generic.

Just because a certain solution seemed simple in PHP, it doesn't mean better solutions don't exist. Like for instance MVC. It might seem to induce more code, more files, more work, but the structure is there for good reason, it seperates the concerns cleanly, and each file in itself becomes more clear and easier to understand.