https://aalvrz.me/tags/back-end/ Recent content in back-end on Andrés Álvarez Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://aalvrz.me/posts/rails-api-with-nested-resources/ Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://aalvrz.me/posts/rails-api-with-nested-resources/ <p><a href="https://github.com/nathanvda/cocoon">Cocoon</a> is a very popular gem to add nested resources functionality in Rails. It allows you to add or remove &ldquo;mini forms&rdquo; of another model into a main model's form and create all objects at once when the form is saved.</p> <p>I was recently finding myself trying to implement a similar functionality using only Rails 5 API and <a href="http://jsonapi.org">JSON API specification</a>.</p> <p>As an example, we will try to implement the commonly seen <em>Work Experience</em> and <em>Educational Background</em> features seen in sites such as LinkedIn, where the user can add many items for these categories. The user's profile and all items for those categories (which are separate models) should all be saved at once, once the form is submitted.</p> <p><img src="https://aalvrz.me/posts/rails-api-with-nested-resources/education.jpg" alt="Education"></p> <h2 id="accepts-nested-attributes-for">accepts_nested_attributes_for</h2> <p><a href="http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/NestedAttributes/ClassMethods.html"><code>accepts_nested_attributes_for</code> </a> allows us to save attributes on <strong>associated</strong> records (work experience, educational background) through a parent record (user). By default nested attribute updating is turned off and you can enable it using the <code>#accepts_nested_attributes_for</code> class method.</p>