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Routes

Basic​

Connect URLs to Code​

  • When your Rails application receives an incoming request for

    GET /patients/17

  • It asks the router to match it to a controller action. If the first matching route is
get '/patients/:id', to: 'patients#show'
  • The request is dispatched to the patients controller's show action with {id: '17'} in params
  • Rails uses snake_case for controller names here, if you have a multiple word controller like MonsterTruckController, you want to use monster_truck#show for example

Configuring the Rails Router​

  • The router for your application or engine live in the file config/routes.rb and typically looks like this

Routes Controller Mapping​

  • Rails will map the route to its corresponding controller according to this syntax

    resource :<resource_name> => <resource_name>Controller

  • E.g: resources :brands => BrandsController, :basket => BasketController
  • NOTES: the mapping only work if the controllers are directly under app/controllers directory, for further customization, see [[Routes#Namespace | Namespace]]

Resource Routing: the Rails default​

  • Resource routing allows you to quickly declare all of the common routes for a given resourceful controller.
  • A single call to resource can declare all the necessary routes
    • index
    • show
    • new
    • edit
    • create
    • update
    • destroy
  • A resourceful route provides a mapping between HTTP verbs and URLs to controller actions.
  • NOTES: If. using --api when creating application, the route index and new will not be created (as we are dealing with [[Rails for API only (what I need) | API-only application]])

Singular Resource​

  • For example, you would like /profile to always show the profile of the currently logged in user. In this case you can use a singular resource to map /profile to the show action

    get 'profile', to: 'users#show'

  • Passing a String to to: will expect a controller#action format. When using a Symbol, the to: option should be replaced with action:. When using a String without a #, the to: option should be replaced with controller:

    get 'profile', action: :show, controller: 'users'

Namespace​

  • You may wish to organize groups of controllers under a namespace.
  • For example: you might group a number of administrative controllers under and Admin:: namespace, and place these controllers under the app/controllers/admin directory. You can route to such a group by using a namespace block
  • This will create a number of routes for each of the articles and comments controller. For Admin::ArticlesController, Rails will create

Nested Resources​

  • It's common to have resources that are logically children of other resources.
  • E.g
  • Nested routes allow you to capture this relationship in your routing. In this case, you could include this in route declartion

Adding More RESTful Actions​

  • We are not limited to the 7 routes that RESTful routing creates by default
  • To add a member route, just add a member block into the resource block
  • This will recognize /photos/1/preview with GET, and route to the preview action of PhotosController, with the resource id value passed in params[:id]