Question

I am new to Ruby on Rails, I have completed the Blog Tutorial.

I am now trying to add an additional action to the controller, called ‘start’.

def start end 

I have added a view page ‘app/views/posts/start.html.erb’ containing nothing but simple html.

When I go to /posts/start i get the following error.

ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound in PostsController#show  Couldn't find Post with ID=start 

I understand the error, the show action is being executed and start is not a valid ID. Why doesn’t the start action get executed, is there some part of the MVC architecture or configuration I am missing ?

Below is my posts_controller.rb

class PostsController < ApplicationController    # GET /posts/start   def start   end    # GET /posts   # GET /posts.xml   def index     @posts = Post.find(:all)     respond_to do |format|       format.html # index.html.erb       format.xml  { render :xml => @posts }     end   end    # GET /posts/1   # GET /posts/1.xml   def show     @post = Post.find(params[:id])     respond_to do |format|       format.html # show.html.erb       format.xml  { render :xml => @post }     end   end  end 

Yes I have restarted the server and tried it with Mongrel and webrick.

Answer 1

Your routing isn’t set up to allow that route. Assuming you’re using the default scaffolding, put this line before the map.resources :posts line in config/routes.rb:

map.connect 'posts/:action', :controller => 'posts', :action => /[a-z]+/i 

The regex for :action restricts it to just a-z (to avoid catching things like /posts/1). It can be improved if you need underscores or numbers in your new actions.