Question

I am learning Ruby on Rails and i did this scaffolding command:

rails g scaffold Alex

and it ran and created all the resources for me. So I tried to make a link from my index page to the alex page like this:

<%= link_to "Alex Link", alex_path(@alex) %>

(I am still not sure what that @alex part is, but it was in the other examples so I tried to have that there)

and in my routes.rb this code was created:

  resources :alexes

  get "home/index"

and when I tried to load the link, it gave me this error:

No route matches {:action=>"show", :controller=>"alexes"}

Just in case, here is the output from rake routes:

    alexes GET    /alexes(.:format)          alexes#index
           POST   /alexes(.:format)          alexes#create
  new_alex GET    /alexes/new(.:format)      alexes#new
 edit_alex GET    /alexes/:id/edit(.:format) alexes#edit
      alex GET    /alexes/:id(.:format)      alexes#show
           PUT    /alexes/:id(.:format)      alexes#update
           DELETE /alexes/:id(.:format)      alexes#destroy
home_index GET    /home/index(.:format)      home#index
      root        /                          home#index
      test POST   /test(.:format)            tests#create
  new_test GET    /test/new(.:format)        tests#new
 edit_test GET    /test/edit(.:format)       tests#edit
           GET    /test(.:format)            tests#show
           PUT    /test(.:format)            tests#update
           DELETE /test(.:format)            tests#destroy

What is wrong with the way that I made the link and how can I make it hit the controller before it goes to the view?

Thanks!

Answer 1

alex_path is for showing a specific Alex object. To use it, @alex needs to be an instance of an Alex object loaded by your controller.

You say you want to link to the “Alex page”, which makes me think you want the listing of all Alex objects, or the index action of your AlexController. If this is the case, you should use alexes_path instead of alex_path(@alex).

If you actually do want to link to a single specific Alex, you’ll need to load an instance from the database:

def my_action
  # make a specific Alex object available to the view
  @alex = Alex.find(...)
end

---

As an aside, you also ask:

how can I make it hit the controller before it goes to the view?

Your controller will always be hit before the views are rendered. It is impossible for a view to be rendered without an action being invoked.