Adding items to a resource restfully using OpenRasta - rest

Question

I'm using OpenRasta to create a Survey application.
I have a SurveyResource that is accessible at /surveys/{id} and editable at /surveys/{id}/edit
I'd now like to add questions to the survey, as that is the point of a survey, but I'm not sure what the most restful way of doing this is and how to set it up in OR.
I'm thinking I should have a QuestionResource (that has details of the question type, question text, etc) and it should be posted to /surveys/{id}/questions and handled by a question handler, but I can't work out how to configure OR.
I've pushed my project onto github at https://github.com/oharab/OpenSurvey/tree/add_question_to_survey
Can anyone help me?
Ben

Answer 1

it depends on the way you want to model your resources. It's perfectly possible that you'd never explicitly provide access to a single question, and would modify the entire survey document, like so:
PUT /surveys/123
<survey>
<link rel="update" href="/surveys/123" method="PUT"
type="application/vnd.mycorp.survey+xml" />
<question id="age">
<label>How old are you?</label>
<select>
<option>0 - 5</option>
<option>6 - 10</option>
<option>10 - 13</option>
</select>
</question>
</survey>
If you go this route, you could even use HTML, or HTML 5 for your content so it's easy to consume by clients. Now you're just modifying the entire survey document at once.
Alternatively, you might want to separately address each question, giving them an individual URI, which I think is what you're talking about, like so:
GET /survey/123
<survey>
<link rel="add-question" href="/survey/123/questions"
type="application/vnd.mycorp.surveyquestion+xml" method="POST" />
<question>
<link rel="delete" href="/questions/123-age" method="DELETE" />
<link rel="update" href="/questions/123-age" type="application/vnd.mycorp.surveyquestion+xml" method="PUT" />
<label>How old are you?</label>
<select>
<option>0 - 5</option>
<option>6 - 10</option>
<option>10 - 13</option>
</select>
</question>
</survey>
Neither of these is more RESTful than the other, the difference is only in granularity of call. If you need the granularity of the latter, then configure yourself a separate handler per resource as in
using(OpenRastaConfiguration.Manual)
{
ResourceSpace.Has.ResourcesOfType<Survey>().AtUri("/survey/{id}").HandledBy<SurveyHandler>();
ResourceSpace.Has.ResourcesOfType<Question>().AtUri("/questions/{id}").HandleBy<QuestionHandler>();
}