Advancing with Rails course - Day 3 - pt2

Rails Routing

routing system does 2 things

1) recognises and inteprets URLs
2) generating URLs and path strings in your views

recognition
- goals to determine controller and action
store other values in params hash

generation
- arguments to link_to, form_for, etc
- for redirection in controllers
anywhere you need a path or URL in your actual code

top-level route

map.root :controller => "cards"

link_to "top", root_path

map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'

shows what you want your URL to look like

routing system only makes sense to itself -> only the routing system can know what the URL means if it generated it.

routing system doesn't know how to resolve for another application

model doesn't know the controller which is manipulating it.

to inject css into a link_to

<%= link_to "log in", {:controller => 'this', :action => 'that'}, :class => "blah" %>

hard coding

map.connect 'help',
:controller => "leagues",
;action => "assist"

this will resolve http://www.web.site.com/help to the specific path leagues/assist
and will only resolve /help as that

map.connect 'help/:controller', :action => "assist"

resolves controller in http://www.web.site.com/help/wibble to the path wibble/assist

extra wildcards can also be added and matched positionally, which are then stored in params
:id is special case though, which allows it to be nil, whereas anything else needs to specified,
or will find no route (unless you use globbing)

you can constrain the wildcards with pattern matching, etc and have many of these, but orderis important
(higher up the routes.rb file, will hit first)

You may need to catch a routing error.

current and default values

missing components get defaults

:controller and :action from current ones
:id, :topic, etc from params hash

default gets turned off after the first one you specify

named routes:

map.<name> "name",
:controller => :x,
:action => :y

then allows
redirect_to name_url
link_to "text" name_path

map.vampires 'vampire/:name/:capacity',
:controller => :cards,
:action => :vampires

<%= link_to "#{vampire} with capacity #{capacity}",
vampires_path :name => vampire, :capacity => capacity %>

<%= link_to "#{vampire} with capacity #{capacity}",
vampires_path (vampire, capacity) %>
(walks through the list into the url space)

Named routes and CRUD

these can be expressive and encourage good action names

cluster thinking around the operation (borrow book is create loan, renew is update, return is destroy/delete, view all loans is read)