Working With Rails

Hi folks,

today I ran into a difficult design issue and I would like to hear some experts on how this is done in the most elegant way.

We are building databases for development aid projects, which can be categorized by things like their donor, their location in the country, their “DAC-CRS Sector” or to which Millenium Development Goals they apply. Don’t think too hard about this, it’s not relevant. ;-)

Now I want to create reports like this one: http://odatest.hacksrus.net/reports/donors.

As you can see in the first generation of my application I haven’t thought too much about the issue and just created a reports controller which donor/mdg/location/sector methods for each of the reports.

However that is neither DRY to me, nor does it really fit into a RESTful application.

My idea was to use nested resources and, in the projects controller’s list action, check whether :donor_id or mdg_id etc. has been supplied.
That would work for the actual reports, but not for the overview pages that list the number of projects per donor, provide the links etc.

I hope someone can come up with a better idea, this is really driving me nuts.

Cheers

Pascal