Question

New to rails, so if this is discussed somewhere, just link me off: I had a good search but all I could find were people trying to figure out how to use link_to, not any discussion of this comment:

link_to "Profile", profile_path(@profile)
# => <a href="/profiles/1">Profile</a>

in place of the older more verbose, non-resource-oriented

link_to "Profile", :controller => "profiles", :action => "show", :id => @profile
# => <a href="/profiles/show/1">Profile</a>

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/UrlHelper.html#method-i-link_to

I get that the latter is more verbose, and thus undesirable, but the former seems like a strange thing to be recommending.

If I have an action at say: /blah/add and I link to it using:

link_to "Link", link_add_path

Then I’m linking to mysite.com/link/add. This is a hard coded url.

If I change the route that this maps to, I have to change every instance of link_to in my code base to point to the new absolute url. This seems crazy.

However, if I link to it using:

link_to "Link", :controller => "thing", :action => "add"

Then the url is dynamically determined. If I have to change the path all I do is edit config/routes.rb and not touch any of my code. This seems like much lower maintenance.

I appreciate it’s slightly more complex than that, the blah_path variable is not actually a static route, and actually contains some smarts like the application base url and prevents you from linking to urls that don’t exist, but it seems like a step backwards to facilitate a fractionally less verbose syntax.

So, what’s up with that?

What technical reason would you choose the former link_to syntax over the latter?

Answer 1

“You’re doing it wrong” 😛

Seriously though: use named resources, and here’s why that’s cool:

Example:
you’ve got this in your routes file:

    resources :user_orders

And you are using “user_orders_path” everywhere. Then you do a refactor and decide (because the orders are now generic) that you want the controller to be called “orders” but you don’t want to break all your old code. you can do this:

    resources :user_orders, controller: "orders"

And your existing links will continue to work! (plus you can add a “orders” resource to move things over to the new scheme)

There’s also neat things like named links:

    match 'exit' => 'sessions#destroy', :as => :logout

I’d also like to add, if you needed to refactor your controller using the old link syntax – you’d still have to change a pile of controller links!