Question

I was reading Simply Rails by Patrick Lenz… maybe I missed something, it seems that whenever we put

map.resources :stories

in routes.rb

then immediately, the controller will have special convention and now Story is a RESTful resource? Maybe the author used the word resource but didn’t mention that it is RESTful but they are the same thing?

Answer 1

Having that in routes means that you automatically get some standard routes that help you build a restful application. For example:

 new_story GET     /story/new(.:format)  {:action=>"new", :controller=>"stories"}
edit_story GET     /story/edit(.:format) {:action=>"edit", :controller=>"stories"}
     story GET     /story(.:format)      {:action=>"show", :controller=>"stories"}
           PUT     /story(.:format)      {:action=>"update", :controller=>"stories"}
           DELETE  /story(.:format)      {:action=>"destroy", :controller=>"stories"}
           POST    /story(.:format)      {:action=>"create", :controller=>"stories"}

Just having this one line in your routes file, gives you all these paths to use. You just have to make sure you provide the right functionality in new, edit, show, update, destroy and create actions of your stories controller and you will have a restful design.

In order to see what is available route-wise, you can go to your application folder and give the command:

rake routes

This is going to output all the paths available to you, based on what you have entered in your routes file.