Question

i have a template url called /monsters. and in the template, i have a sidebar

Sort by Type:

• Water
• Fire
• Earth
• Flying
• etc…

i was wondering what was the best way to route each of those? im guessing it would be good to have the urls such as

www.example.com/monsters/water 

or

www.example.com/monsters/fire.

how should i go about doing that? on my routes.rb i thought of

match 'monsters/water',     to: 'monsters#water'
match 'monsters/fire',      to: 'monsters#fire'
match 'monsters/earth',     to: 'monsters#earth'
match 'monsters/flying',    to: 'monsters#flying'

etc…

but i feel like thats not a good way of doing. having a separate match going to a different action every time? could someone help me with the design? thorough and clear help would be much appreciated = )

thanks a bunch = )

or should i even be having separate links to begin with? should i be posting everything to my index action? i thought of using a form and using :post but thats already taken by my create action for monsters. currently on my index page (/monsters) its listing all of them because in my index action, i just do a

@monsters = Monster.paginate(page: params[:page])

Answer 1

What you need is:

resources :monsters, path: '/monsters/:category'

This will generate these routes:

named path   | verb   | route                                  | controller#action
             |        |                                        |
monsters     | GET    | /monsters/:category(.:format)          | monsters#index
monsters     | POST   | /monsters/:category(.:format)          | monsters#create
new_monster  | GET    | /monsters/:category/new(.:format)      | monsters#new
edit_monster | GET    | /monsters/:category/:id/edit(.:format) | monsters#edit
monster      | GET    | /monsters/:category/:id(.:format)      | monsters#show
monster      | PUT    | /monsters/:category/:id(.:format)      | monsters#update
monster      | DELETE | /monsters/:category/:id(.:format)      | monsters#destroy

And it will allow you to do things like:

/monsters/fire  => { controller: 'monsters', action: 'index', category: 'fire' }
/monsters/water => { controller: 'monsters', action: 'index', category: 'water' }
/monsters/earth/15 => { controller: 'monsters', action: 'show', category: 'earth', id: 15 }

Plus, you can still use named paths:

monsters_path('flying') => '/monsters/flying'
edit_monster_path('fire', 15) => '/monsters/fire/15'

And link to monsters like:

<%= link_to monster.name, monster_path(monster.category, monster.id) -%>