CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2013/ch1a 1b mh

Ruby CRUD - Update and Destroy

Introduction

Modern application delivery has undergone drastic changes in recent years, and the introduction of SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service, provides a way for software to be provided "on demand" to a user as needed. Essentially, what this means, is that users interact with a given application through a web based interface referred to as a "thin client", and another computer actually performs the applications computational tasks. The thin client is primarly tasked with displaying the application interface, and relaying the users actions back to the primary computational unit. Such a delivery model has many advantages, such as eliminating the need to install an application locally, and reducing the computational demand on the local client. In addition, this allows the hosting computer to provide an indeterminate number of interfaces to multiple users, as well as being able to free the resources used supplying the service once the user no longer needs them. The architecture used for many SaaS solutions is based on the "Model-View-Controller" architecture. This architecture is modular, easily expandable, very flexible, and many solutions have been created to help software engineers develop SaaS enviornments and by extension the delivery methods needed to produce these products. This article is primarily focused on the development suite, Ruby on Rails, and in particular, 2 types of actions used by this software.

Rails is a framework application development suite for SaaS development, based on the object-oriented language, Ruby, and based on the afore-mentioned Model-View-Controller architecture.

CRUD

Edit/Update

locate the object
	@object = Object.find params(:id)

update it
	@object.update_attributes!(params[:param])

inform of successful update
	flash[:notice]

go to the updated object
	redirect_to object_path(@object)

Destroy

locate the object
        @object = Object.find params(:id)

destroy it
	@object.destroy

inform of successful update
	flash[:notice] = "Object '#{@object.title}' deleted."

go to the updated object
	redirect_to object_path(@object)