Question

I am using Rails single-table inheritance with a superclass Content and a number of subclasses (such as Article, Comment etc.) I am trying to get away with a single controller, and I have set up the routes thusly:

resources :contents
resources :articles, :controller => "contents"
resources :comments, :controller => "contents"

This way, /articles/new gets routed to contents#new which seems to be what I want.

Within the controller and the views, however, I need to tailor the functionality a bit depending on which actual model I am dealing with. For that purpose, I need to determine the original requested resource or otherwise find out which subclass I am dealing with.

Looking at params for /articles/newwithin the common controller gives {"action"=>"new", "controller"=>"contents"}, which obviously does not provide the information I need.

Either the answer is really obvious or I am using model inheritance wrong. Which one is it? 🙂

Answer 1

You can extract the part of the request path you are interested in like this

path = request.fullpath[%r{^/(articles|comments)/}, 1] # articles or comments

Once you have it you can get the model class like that:

model_class = path.classify.constantize # Article or Comment

Bests,

Richard