Working With Rails

Routing Tricks

This is a collection of hacks and tricks that may or may not actually be useful. It is intended more as a tool for exploring (and teaching) the internals of Rails’ routing implementation.

map.redirect

This is a tool for specifying a redirect from one route to another. Any request matching the route will emit a 302 response that redirects to the target route. It requires that the target be a named route. Consider:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.resources :things
  map.redirect  "/", :things
end

By default, the map.resources command does not map anything to the root URL, ”/”. We can use map.redirect to easily cause requests for ”/” to be redirected to the things url, ”/things”.

If a route has parameters, those will be passed to the destination route as well:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.resources :things
  map.redirect  "/:id", :thing
end

In this case, a request for ”/15” would be redirected to ”/thing/15”, automatically.

Recognition based on host/domain/subdomain

This allows you to specify the host, domain, or subdomain as a condition for recogizing the request. For instance, you can have two identical paths that route to different controllers and actions, depending on what the subdomain is:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.connect "/", :controller => "admin", :conditions => { :subdomain => "admin" }
  map.connect "/", :controller => "public" 
end

Then, “admin.foo.com” would go to the admin controller, while “www.foo.com” and “123.foo.com” will go to the public controller.

Similarly, you can specify :host and :domain in the conditions hash. The values can be either strings (for exact matches) or regular expressions (for more dynamic matching).

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly