rails activeresource messages

Question

I have a quick question about active resource. If I have a User resource, when I do a call like

User.find(1).put(:promote, :position => 'manager')

According to the api it translates into this call /users/1/promote.xml?position=manager

My question is this. Is activeresource actually making two calls here? find doing a get, then putting on that object, or does appending .put to the .find mean that it just makes a single call. If this is so, then the only reason for the .find is the give the proper url format of /users/:id/promote ??

I couldn't find in the docs where this might be specified, but it's the .find that makes me think maybe two service calls are taking place?

Answer 1

If ActiveResource works like ActiveRecord, I would say 'yes'. If you do something like

Foo.find(1).update_attributes(:name=>"Bar")

ActiveRecord first does a select to get the object and then issues an update call to the database to change the record. I would presume that ActiveResources functions in a similar manner where it issues two web services calls to get the object and then update the object.