Useful Rails Routing tips

Even though I have been using Rails for fun and profit for about 2 years now, I felt I never really used it’s routing engine to its full potential. So I checked out new Rails Routing from the outside in guide and discovered bunch of useful tricks that I (and maybe you) had no idea you could do. Here they are:

Multiple resource definitions on a single line

map.resources :photos, :books, :videos

Impose a certain format for resource identifiers

map.resources :photos, :requirements => { :id => /[A-Z][A-Z][0-9]+/ }

This way, /photos/3 would not work, but /photos/DA321 would.

Friendlier action names

Say for your application ‘create’ and ‘change’ make more sense than the default ‘new’ and ‘edit’ you can do

map.resources :photos, :path_names => { :new => 'make', :edit => 'change' }

You can also do this site-wide also, in your environment.rb

config.action_controller.resources_path_names = { :new => 'make', :edit => 'change' }

Trim the fat off resources with :only and :except

When you use map.resources, rails generates 7 restful routes for that resource; But what if that resource only needed to be seen and listed, never edited or created?

map.resources :photos, :only => [:index, :show]

If your application uses a lot of map.resources calls but not neccesarily all its generated routes, you can save memory this way.

Adding extra routes to your resources

Instead of fighting the map.resources generator by placing a horror like this atop your routes.rb

map.connect '/photos/:id/preview', { :controller => 'photos', :action => 'preview' }

You can do this to your already mapped resource

map.resources :photos, :member => { :preview => :get }

This will map all GET’s to /photos/3 to the preview action of your photos controller

This can also be  used in collections instead of singular members, just change :member to :collection

map.resources :photos, :collection => { :search => :get }

This will give you /photos/search and hit the search action within the photos controller