Web Services on Rails

Putting It All Together: an Expanded Server Example

Now that we've covered the various dispatching modes and discussed how to define a web service API with appropriate signatures, we're ready to dive into a more realistic example. We'll develop the basics of a football statistics web service, starting with two methods: Listgames and Getgamestats. The first method requires an integer parameter that represents a year; it returns a list of games in that year for which statistics are available. The second method requires two parameters, both strings: a username and gamename. If the username is valid, this method returns the actual statistics for a specific game.

We'll start by defining the web service API in app/apis/stats_api.rb:

class StatsApi < ActionWebService::API::Base
  api_method :listgames,
     :expects => [{:year => :int}],
     :returns => [[:string]]

  api_method :getgamestats,
     :expects => [{:username => :string}, {:gamename => :string}],
     :returns => [[Footballstats]]
end

The StatsApi class reflects the service's design requirements. It defines two methods. The first, listgames, requires an integer argument; it returns an array of strings to our clients. The second requires two string arguments and returns an array of Footballstats, which we will define as an ActionWebService::Struct type.

The next step is to set up a controller in the file app/controllers/stats_controller.rb:

class StatsController < ApplicationController wsdl_service_name 'Stats' wsdl_namespace 'urn:sportsxml' web_service_dispatching_mode ...