Question

I am trying to make some clean URLs in a Rails3 application I am working on… but I am having a hard time understanding how to (or if I even should) customise my routes to make this work.

Here is the example:

I have a list of Stores. Each store is in a category (health, sports etc). Each store has a location.

I have 2 ways I’d like to present the data. One display is a list of all the stores in a directory type structure, the other is on a map.

Ideally I’d like my URLs to work something like this:

/stores/health/map (or /stores/map/health) to show just the health stores on a map (where essentially the map parameter is effecting which view is displayed, but still using the Index controller… which using a collection in my route doesn’t seem to suit)

The other URL I’d like is /stores/sports/ to show just the sports stores in a directory view (the default) for example…

I am not entirely clear how I can manipulate the routes to handle this…

Here is my current Route which isn’t really doing it for me:

resources :stores do
  collection do
    get 'map'
  end
end

On top of that, I’d like to be able to add filters without using ?query=params… so:

/stores/sports/hockey , would essentially filter out only hockey stores…

I have no issues doing this with ?query, it’s just putting my params into a nicer URL that I’m trying to achieve.

The documentation does not seem to outline what I am trying to do, so Im assuming what Im trying to do is wrong.

Is this breaking REST? Am I looking at it all backwards?

Thanks for your help, JD

Answer 1

You might be overthinking this. 🙂

If you want to route HTTP Get of ‘stores/health/map’ to the StoresController with an action name of, say, health_map, what you need to do is:

get 'stores/health/map' => 'stores#health_map'

Anything that is a clean URL and doesn’t modify data and uses HTTP GET is RESTful. (And that is coming from a co-author of a book on REST). It is when you wish to modify data that you need to be more careful on how you use methods.

To do filtering, try something like:

get '/stores/sports/:filter' => 'stores#sports'

The value of the filter will come into your method as params[:filter]