Question

I don’t understand the necessity for nested routes. There are many things about Rails routes that I DO understand.

Here is my simple setup in this Rails 3.2 application:

Categories habtm Products

In routes.rb:

resources :categories do
  member do
    get 'list_products_in'
    post 'add_to'
    post 'remove_from'
  end
end

resources :products

I have basically created a page from which to add products to a category. There is a select box at the top containing the products, and at the bottom is the list. To add a product to the list, you choose one from the select box and click the “Add” button. “add_to” is called via Ajax. Works great.

My problem is that to make this app degrade gracefully, I want it to work without Ajax also. But none of my routes work properly.

I know from the above that my custom routes are not expecting a product_id to be passed in addition to the category id. My question is, how can I add more parameters to my custom routes?

Answer 1

You can use :variable segments in your routes to supply additional variable segments.

For example, you could add a product_id segment to your add_to and remove_from routes:

...
post 'add_to/:product_id'
post 'remove_from/:product_id'