Question

I’ve just added a contact form to my Rails application so that site visitors can send me a message. The application has a Message resource and I’ve defined this custom route to make the URL nicer and more obvious:

map.contact '/contact', :controller => 'messages', :action => 'new'

How can I keep the URL as /contact when the model fails validation? At the moment the URL changes to /messages upon validation failure.

This is the create method in my messages_controller:

def create
  @message = Message.new(params[:message])

  if @message.save
    flash[:notice] = 'Thanks for your message etc...'
    redirect_to contact_path
  else
    render 'new', :layout => 'contact'
  end
end

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

One solution would be to make two conditional routes with the following code:

map.contact 'contact', :controller => 'messages', :action => 'new', :conditions => { :method => :get }
map.connect 'contact', :controller => 'messages', :action => 'create', :conditions => { :method => :post } # Notice we are using 'connect' here, not 'contact'! See bottom of answer for explanation

This will make all get request (direct requests etc.) use the ‘new’ action, and the post request the ‘create’ action. (There are two other types of requests: put and delete, but these are irrelevant here.)

Now, in the form where you are creating the message object change

<%= form_for @message do |f| %>

to

<%= form_for @message, :url => contact_url do |f| %>

(The form helper will automatically choose the post request type, because that is default when creating new objects.)

Should solve your troubles.

(This also won’t cause the addressbar to flicker the other address. It never uses another address.)

.

• Explanation why using connect is not a problem here
  The map.name_of_route references JUST THE PATH. Therefore you don’t need a new named route for the second route. You can use the original one, because the paths are the same. All the other options are used only when a new request reaches rails and it needs to know where to send it.

.

EDIT

If you think the extra routes make a bit of a mess (especially when you use it more often) you could create a special method to create them. This method isn’t very beautiful (terrible variable names), but it should do the job.

def map.connect_different_actions_to_same_path(path, controller, request_types_with_actions) # Should really change the name...
  first = true # There first route should be a named route
  request_types_with_actions.each do |request, action|
    route_name = first ? path : 'connect'
    eval("map.#{route_name} '#{path}', :controller => '#{controller}', :action => '#{action}', :conditions => { :method => :#{request.to_s} }")
    first = false
  end
end

And then use it like this

map.connect_different_actions_to_same_path('contact', 'messages', {:get => 'new', :post => 'create'})

I prefer the original method though…