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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T23:36:41+00:00

I have a system with a web UI that works as normal, and an

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I have a system with a web UI that works as normal, and an API endpoint at /receiver_api. Users send emails which are parsed by Mailgun, who then submit a POST to this endpoint. There are a lot of possible actions that we may want to take, depending on the values of these params (create new post, create new reply, add subscription, delete subscription etc.), and when writing the handler it felt like we were doing a kind of routing again!

So we would like to choose the controller that we direct the request to based on what the POST params are. We are directing /receiver_api to a ReceiverApi#receiver controller/method at the moment, which inherits from ApplicationController. It currently effectively routes requests to other “fake” controllers that don’t inherit from ApplicationController (since redirecting from one Rails controller to another wouldn’t work). We would like to be ultimately routing to Rails controllers so we can use before_filter and all the other magic in them.

Anyway, one possibility that springs to mind is a method in routes.rb that accesses the POST params and returns the Rails controller/method that should be directed to. 2 questions:

  1. Is this possible? Can you access POST params in routes.rb?

  2. Is there a better way of doing this? We had thought about moving up a level into Rack, and will probably do this at some point, but would rather just get something out of the door if this will take a while.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Choosing a controller based on params is not a good thing to do.

    A better alternative is to refactor your code (in those fake controllers) to methods in your model, and call model methods based on the params from your controller.

    You cannot access params in your routes.rb, because it is run at initialization.

    If you really want to call controllers based on params, there is a way of doing this, by redirecting to another controller. This is explained in http://www.railsonwave.com/2008/10/25/how-to-call-a-controller-s-action-from-a-different-controller/ [bad link], but do note that it is very much a hack.

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