Rails - Apr 2010 - Design - Best practices on managing many-to-many controllers?

Hi,

This may seem a silly question, but I didn''t find an elegant solution
to manage a user''s tag collection. Perhaps I''m missing
something, I''d
like to know if there is a better way to handle it are.

The configuration is pretty standard stuff:

user.rb:
  has_many :user_tags, :dependent => :destroy
  has_many :tags, :through => :user_tags

tag.rb:
  has_many :user_tags, :dependent => :destroy
  has_many :users, :through => :user_tags

user_tag.rb:
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :tag

(tags also have many-to-many associations w/ other resources).

I would like users to have a separate page to manage their tags.

I have thought about some solutions:

* Manage the tags using different templates for user actions. Problem:
doesn''t scale, will add complex logic to controllers.

* Extend the users resource with two new member actions. Problem:
doesn''t scale, users will have many more collections.

* Create a controller for user_tags, nest the resource under users.
This is what I''m using now. It doesn''t feel right to
manipulate the
user_tags table directly, Rails already has logic for things like:

  user.tags << Tag.find_or_create_by_name("foo")
  user.tags.delete(Tag.find(params[:id]))

* Create a non-restful controller, maybe to manage all users''
collections, keeping things in one place. Add routes manually. In
particular, leverage the construct:

  accepts_nested_attributes_for :tags, ...


Any thoughts?

Thanks,

--
Adriano

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I decided to create a restful controller for the tags, nested in the
users resources, and not associated with any model:

  resources :users do
    resources :utags, :only => [:index, :create, :destroy]
  end

I''m using these routes in the views:

  <%= link_to ''destroy'', user_utag_path(@user, tag),
:method
=> :delete %>

  <%= form_tag user_utags_path(@user) do %>

And in the controller (no error handling for now):

    create:
    tag = Tag.find_or_create_by_name(params[:name])
    @user.tags << tag

    destroy:
    tag = Tag.find(params[:id])
    @user.tags.delete(tag)

I think that this is a satisfactory solution.

--
Adriano

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