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I have a rails app where my users can buddy up with other users. Since that relationship can have a status (approved/rejected/pending), I decided to go with a join model (UserRelationship) so now I have the attribute.

To handle state for that join model, I have a controller (UserRelationshipsController) with actions/RESTful endpoints for changing the state of the relationship. Is this bad practice? If so, where should I handle state-changes for the relationship? In the User model?

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  • That's totally ok. Quite typical actually and the only way to stay RESTful, otherwise you would have to add some non-REST actions to the UsersController. – thorsten müller Jun 18 '14 at 16:09
  • You outlined exactly the right approach. – Ben Lee Jul 3 '14 at 4:22
  • Yep that's the way to do it – Vince V. Aug 23 '15 at 18:20
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You can treat UserRelationship as a separate resource (as you proposed in your question) or you can use Nested resources (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#nested-resources) to have something like this

POST user/9/relationship (POST/PATCH: user_id: 10, status: 'confirmed')

to set/get relationship statuses for specific user.

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