Rails%203%20In%20Action

370 CHAPTER 13 Designing an API
13.1.10 Updating a project
To update a project in the API, people will need to make a POST request to the /api/
v1/projects/:id URL with the project’s new information contained in a params[:project]
hash. Simple, really.
To test that this action works correctly, you’ll add yet another spec to spec/api/v1/
projects_spec.rb using the code from the following listing.
Listing 13.17 spec/api/v1/projects_spec.rb
context "updating a project" do
before do
user.admin = true
user.save
end
let(:url) { "/api/v1/projects/#{@project.id}" }
it "successful JSON" do
@project.name.should eql("Ticketee")
put "#{url}.json", :token => token,
:project => {
:name => "Not Ticketee"
}
last_response.status.should eql(200)
@project.reload
@project.name.should eql("Not Ticketee")
last_response.body.should eql("{}")
end
end
At the top of this new context block, you’ve defined that the user is an admin again.
You could wrap the create and update tests within another context that sets this flag
too, but you’ll do it this way for now.
You need to make a put request to this action for Rails to accept it, and you can do
that by using the put method B. Along with this request, you send the token and
project parameters. The project parameter contains a new name for this project.
Because it’s a valid (non-blank) name, the response’s status code will be 200, but the
response will be an empty hash indicating no errors. This doesn’t return an updated
object, because what’s the point? The client should be aware of the updates that have
occurred, given it triggered them!
At the end of this spec, you use the reload method to find this object again from
the database. This is because the object that the spec is working with will be a completely
different Ruby object from the one in the update action in the controller. By
calling reload, Rails will fetch the data for this object again from the database and
update the object in the process.
To begin writing this action in Api::V1::ProjectsController, you’re going to
need to first modify the before_filter :find_project line to include the update
action, changing it from this
before_filter :find_project, :only => [:show]
B put request