Question

Very often in a rails project, I have a ‘content’ controller that houses miscellaneous pages like the about us page and the contact us page and the intro page, etc.

I usually do something like

match '/content/:action', :controller => 'content'

in the routes.rb file, but I’m at a loss as to how to reference it inside my views.

What is the intended way to reference them?
Is it:

= link_to "Help", '/dashboard/help'

Or do I need to create a named route for each of these things?

Answer 1

No, you don’t need the named route, but it is the convention. You can do the following as well:

<%= link_to "Help", {controller: 'dashboard', action: 'help' } %></li>

And in the routes file it would look like:

match '/help', to: 'dashboard#help'

As long as you map it somehow, even doing resources :dashboard it will work. For a little extra help here’s the guide on Routing in Rails. You can also list all your routes using the rake routes command and it will list the routes like so:

 help        /help(.:format)                static_pages#help
     about        /about(.:format)               static_pages#about
   contact        /contact(.:format)             static_pages#contact

Which means, in this case, you can use help_path, about_path and contact_path.