URL Routing Application

Question

In a Ruby on Rails application I want to have this routing:

• for URL www.example.com/reports go to controller documents and action reports
• for URL www.example.com/charts go to controller documents and action charts

In the routes.rb file I currently have:

scope controller: :documents do
 get 'reports' => :reports
 get 'charts' => :charts
end

The code works as expected, but is there a way so I keep the code dry and don't repeat the action names?

Answer 1

You could do the following. (I assume you already have a resourceful route for your documents right?)

resources :documents do
 collection do 
 get 'reports'
 get 'charts'
 end
end

To take advantage of the nested routing provided by rails (see the docs)

Which will generate the following urls:

 Prefix Verb URI Pattern Controller#Action
reports_documents GET /documents/reports(.:format) documents#reports
 charts_documents GET /documents/charts(.:format) documents#charts

If you don't have any resourceful route, you have to declare it like you already did. The only thing to do would be iterating over an array like this:

scope controller: :documents do
 %w(reports charts).each do |action|
 get action
 end
end

But IMO this hurts the readability of the code, and is only necessary when dealing with a lot of routes.

• Daniel: Code dumps ('try this:') are not allowed as answers here. Please add what this does and why it is better than OPs solution.
• siegy22: @Coal_ sorry, first time I do code review and not answering on stackoverflow.
• True Soft: Your example works. You're right about readability, but I was just wondering how to do it, as I tried but I was unable to make it work.

Answer 2

If you choose to use non-restful actions, you will have to define all of the custom actions.