Question

Working on a simple API, I noticed that my routing tests were failing because my :id params were strings and I was comparing them to integer values. Is there a way to automatically cast request parameters via routes.rb in some way? For example, given the following route (/profile/1), I’d like params[:id] to be an integer (1) rather than a string (“1”):

namespace :api do
  namespace :v1  do
    scope '/profile' do
      get ':id' => 'users#show', :id => /\d+/
    end
  end
end

Answer 1

A quick example from here:

match '/:id' => 'posts#show', :constraints => {:id => /^\d/}

Then you’d have to do

params[:id].to_i

in the controller action to cast it explicitly. I’m not sure there is another way to do this directly in routes.rb without monkey-patching how Rails collects params.

Taken from the Ruby on Rails Guides:

The value of params[:ids] will now be [“1”, “2”, “3”]. Note that parameter values are always strings; Rails makes no attempt to guess or cast the type.