Question

I am a beginner in learning Ruby and Rails.

I was going through the following section on Rails 3.2.1 Guide:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#paths-and-urls

which says:

Creating a resourceful route will also expose a number of helpers to the controllers   
in    your application. In the case of resources :photos:

photos_path returns /photos
new_photo_path returns /photos/new
edit_photo_path(:id) returns /photos/:id/edit (for instance, edit_photo_path(10) returns /photos/10/edit)
photo_path(:id) returns /photos/:id (for instance, photo_path(10) returns /photos/10)

I am curious to know how and when in the lifecycle of a request are these helpers, i.e. new_photo_path, edit_photo_path etc created and where in the source code I can found the code doing the same.

I was navigating through the code in the following file /gems/actionpack-3.2.1/lib/action_dispatch/routing/mapper.rb and I guess the code in this file is creating the above helpers.Please correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks,
Jignesh

Answer 1

Essentially, yes, that is correct. For more information, you should check out the Routing Walkthrough series that Ryan Bates did last September, where he walks through some of the Rails code that controls routing.