Question

I’d just started toying around with Ruby on Rails and had come across an issue with linking to another action in a controller from a particular view. I am almost certain it’s an issue (or lack of code) in my routes.rb file, but I think I’m misunderstanding exactly how this file works & what I have to do. I’ve got a solution but pretty sure it’s not the “best way” to do it.

I have one controller called home with two actions, index (which is the default) and newbill. Inside index.html.erb I have:

<h1>Home View</h1>
<%= link_to "new", :controller => "home", :action => "newbill" %>

However I was getting a routing error:

No route matches {:controller=>"home", :action=>"newbill"}

Doing rake routes gives me the following:

root  / {:controller=>"home", :action=>"index"}

I then (following some Googling) added this code to routes.rb

match 'home/newbill' => 'home#newbill', :as => :newbill

And then in my index.html.erb I’ve got this:

<%= link_to "Name", newbill_path %>

And now this works as expected. My questions however are:

1. Why does this work? What exactly is going on behind the scenes?
2. Surely this is not the best way to do it? Adding another match 'home/newbill'... for every controller / action I want to link to seems a rubbish way of doing things.

I really like Ruby, but struggling a bit with this aspect of Rails…routing in general is messing up my head a bit I think!

Any help is much appreciated 😀

Thanks,

Jack

Answer 1

You should check out the Rails Routing guide. A read through will help you understand what is going on behind the scenes.