Article:		Putting REST on Rails
Subject:		How about joined tables?
Date:		2006-08-01 18:00:53
From:		johnarmstrong
I'd like to see some more info on :has_many and :belongs_to. I hook these up and they are not automagically part of my REST output. I think I can expose them manually in the XML but it would be nice to have the view call to .to_xml expose them.

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• How about joined tables?
  2006-08-02 01:28:30 dkubb2
  
  You wouldn't necessarily want join tables to be automatically dumped via to_xml, simply because for one project a single table join is sufficient, but other projects may need to join several tables to display a resouce. There's not one approach that would satisfy all instances, and to_xml chooses the most efficient approach by default.

  
  For this example I used to_xml because it was simple, but in real world systems I've worked with a resource is comprised of more than just one model object. For all but the simplest resources I usually pull in several objects for the view.