Rails%203%20In%20Action

374 CHAPTER 13 Designing an API
The entire projects API is now complete. What you’ve got at the moment is a solid
base for version 1 of Ticketee’s projects API. You’ll now see how you can begin creating
the nested API for tickets on a project.
13.2 Beginning the tickets API
In this section you’ll begin to create an API for tickets on a project. You’re only going
to be creating the part of the API to list tickets for now, because the remaining parts
are similar in style to what you saw with the projects API. This section will give you a
taste of how to work with nested resources within the context of an API.
The first part you’re going to need for this API is two tests: one to make sure you
can get XML results back from this API and another for JSON results. Put these new
tests in a new file at spec/api/v1/tickets_spec.rb, beginning with the setup required for
both of these tests shown in the following listing.
Listing 13.21 spec/api/v1/tickets_spec.rb
require 'spec_helper'
describe "/api/v1/tickets", :type => :api do
let(:project) { Factory(:project, :name => "Ticketee") }
before do
@user = create_user!
@user.update_attribute(:admin, true)
@user.permissions.create!(:action => "view",
:thing => project)
end
let(:token) { @user.authentication_token }
In this spec you use a before block to set up your user, rather than using a let as you
did in spec/api/v1/projects_spec.rb. The reason for this is when a let is referenced,
the block is re-run. If you were to create five tickets and reference a user object set up
with let, it would create five users. This problem becomes way more pronounced
when you create 100 objects, each referencing the let.
With this setup, you can begin the context for your index action and then in a
before block, create 20 tickets for the project by using these lines after the
let(:project) line:
context "index" do
before do
5.times do
Factory(:ticket, :project => project, :user => @user)
end
end
Finally, you can write the XML and JSON tests by placing the code shown in the following
listing inside the context block you have written.