---
title: "Useful Rails Routing tips"
date: 2009-01-02T15:50:00Z
comments: false
url: /post/67873462/useful-rails-routing-tips
tags:
---



Even though I have been using Rails for fun and profit for about 2 years now, I felt I never really used it’s routing engine to its full potential. So I checked out new [Rails Routing from the outside in](http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing_outside_in.html) guide and discovered bunch of useful tricks that I (and maybe you) had no idea you could do. Here they are:

### Multiple resource definitions on a single line

```ruby
map.resources :photos, :books, :videos
```

### Impose a certain format for resource identifiers

```ruby
map.resources :photos, :requirements => { :id => /[A-Z][A-Z][0-9]+/ }
```

This way, `/photos/3` would not work, but `/photos/DA321` would.

### Friendlier action names

Say for your application ‘create’ and ‘change’ make more sense than the default ‘new’ and ‘edit’ you can do

```ruby
map.resources :photos, :path_names => { :new => 'make', :edit => 'change' }
```

You can also do this site-wide also, in your environment.rb

```ruby
config.action_controller.resources_path_names = { :new => 'make', :edit => 'change' }
```

### Trim the fat off resources with :only and :except


When you use map.resources, rails generates 7 restful routes for that resource; But what if that resource only needed to be seen and listed, never edited or created?

```ruby
map.resources :photos, :only => [:index, :show]
```

If your application uses a lot of `map.resources` calls but not neccesarily all its generated routes, you can save memory this way.

### Adding extra routes to your resources

Instead of fighting the `map.resources` generator by placing a horror like this atop your routes.rb

```ruby
map.connect '/photos/:id/preview', { :controller => 'photos', :action => 'preview' }
```

You can do this to your already mapped resource

```ruby
map.resources :photos, :member => { :preview => :get }
```

This will map all GET’s to `/photos/3` to the preview action of your photos controller

This can also be  used in collections instead of singular members, just change `:member` to `:collection`

```ruby
map.resources :photos, :collection => { :search => :get }
```

This will give you `/photos/search` and hit the search action within the photos controller