Question

When I’m generating controller with methods in routes I have something like this:

get "vehicle_manufacturers/show"

Is it a good practice that after that I will write such code:

match 'vehicle_manufacturers/:id/' => 'vehicle_manufacturers#show', :as => :vehiclemanufacturers

Or, is there another way of writing this code so that will work properly?

Answer 1

It’s best practice to follow Rails conventions for naming and routing to your actions. This lets you say:

resources :vehicle_manufacturers

This will automatically create routes for index, new, create, show, edit, update, and delete with the appropriate HTTP methods and helper names. Assuming it corresponds to a VehicleManufacturer object that conforms to ActiveModel conventions (like ActiveRecord, Mongoid, etc.), url_for will automatically Do The Right Thing™, letting you use forms and redirects and such with no extra routing-related work.

It’s pretty common that you might only want a subset of these methods. That’s fine too:

resources :vehicle_manufacturers, :only => [:index, :show]

You want to support additional methods outside the normal CRUD methods. Go for it:

resources :vehicle_manufacturers, :only => [:index, :show] do
  get :stock_price, :on => :member
end

This would add a route named stock_price_vehicle_manufacturer mapping to /vehicle_manufacturers/:id/stock_price. Although, strictly speaking, I might consider a stock price to be a sub-resource…

The point is, try to use resources as the basis of your routing. It makes everything easier.