Question

I am wondering if there is a way to extend the existing path helpers that Rails created for my routes.

I have something like /videos/view/:id already and now I need to append a tag parameter to that link wherever it (from the current params collection).

The only solution I see right now is to go through all the views and change the call to the helper to look like this:

view_videos_path(video, tag: params[:tag])

Now obviously that’s a bit of work and a much easier way to do this would be to just overwrite the existing path helper with something like this:

def view_videos_path(video, opts)
  view_videos_path(video, opts.merge(tag: params[:tag]))
end

Obviously putting this in a module would result in a endless recursion so I wonder if there is any best practice on how to do this.

Also, what do you think of the approach? I am not really sure if extending the helper like this is wise or not. But to me at the moment it looks reasonable.

Answer 1

Throw them in a helper module and call super, you can also include it into ApplicationController so the paths are also available in your controllers:

# app/helpers/path_helpers.rb
module PathHelpers
  def view_videos_path(video, opts)
    super(video, opts.merge(tag: params[:tag]))
  end
end

class ApplicationController
  include PathHelpers # we could also use helper_method for each method
end