In part I I explained how to access Rails data from Flash.
However Yves aka Kadoudal was wondering what I did with Rails to return the event record:
Rails.get(‘events’, rails_events); how rails returns the event record as we don’t call a controller/action … ? I believe doing it RESTFul it’s depending upon your route ? is it not?
We are actually calling a controller/action If you look at the Restfulflash class, you’ll notice a function called get
public function get(controller, callback){
var railsReply:XML = new XML();
railsReply.ignoreWhite = true;
railsReply.onLoad = function(success:Boolean){
if (success) {
trace ('Rails responded: '+railsReply);
callback.text = railsReply;
} else {
trace ('Error while waiting for Rails to reply');
callback.text = 'error';
}
}
var railsRequest:XML = new XML();
railsRequest.contentType='application/xml';
railsRequest.sendAndLoad(this.gateway+controller, railsReply);
delete railsRequest;
}
What’s really interesting are the following 2 lines:
railsRequest.contentType=”application/xml”;
railsRequest.sendAndLoad(this.gateway+controller, railsReply);
I’m preparing a request that I will send to my gateway mentioning the controller name. In the previous example I was calling the ‘events’ controller: http://mysite.fr/events because I’m using REST and because my request is a ‘get’ Rails will call the index action.
for more info on RESTful design check the nice series available from the softies on rails blog
Let’s just look at my code and see what’s up with rails magic 
Here is my index action sending you back a different object based on the header of your request.
class EventsController < ApplicationController
# GET /events
# GET /events.xml
def index
@events = Event.find(:all)
respond_to do |format|
format.html # index.rhtml
format.xml { render 
ml => @events.to_xml }
format.json { render :json => @events.to_json }
end
end
That’s it, and it was automatically created for you by the script/generate scaffold_resource command
Since I’m answering Yves’ questions, let’s look at his final question:
problem : what if the xml returned is not a record, but it has to be prepared by Rails…
I explain, right now my rails view .. I have a javascript object passing all the info via JS
I would like to replace the datasource file by a direct call to rails from Flash, so this param will disappear… so (correct me if I am wrong)
1- I need to pass a user_id value in JS to Flash in the script…
2- Flash need to send a request to Rails (controller/action/id to prepare the xml… ) to get in return a correct xlm object to be displayed
1- I’m not sure why you need to pass the user_id from JS to Flash but I guess Flash doesn’t know what user to query?? (anyway that would work)
2- If you are using REST, Flash just needs make a get call to /controller/id Make sure to set the request header type as xml, like I did in my function railsRequest.contentType=”application/xml”; Otherwise I believe (but didn’t try) that you can call /events/1.xml where 1 id the id of the event you want to retrieve.
By the way, it will call the show action from the events controller which looks like that:
def show
@event = Event.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
format.html # show.rhtml
format.xml { render ml => @event.to_xml }
end
end
