CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrails-routing
George Armhold
George Armhold

Reputation: 31074

rails routing: combine index and show actions

I have an existing search-based app that's being ported to Rails. Due to the legacy nature, I need to preserve existing URLs of the form:

/books          # search all books
/books/fiction  # search books with :category => fiction

I have these mapped to the index & show actions of my controller, and it works fine, but the code and markup for showing all books vs a particular category of books is virtually identical.

What's the best way to combine the show and index actions? For this app index is really a degenerate case of show with :category => nil.

I can do:

def index
   show
   render "show"
end

but that seems kind of ugly. Is there a more idiomatic way to do this in Rails?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1748

Answers (1)

mu is too short
mu is too short

Reputation: 434685

Why not simply use one route with an optional category:

get '/books(/:category)' => 'books#search'

and then in BooksController:

def search
    # Look at params[:category], if it is there then use it
    # to search, if it isn't there then list 'em all.
    @results = ...
end

Then you have just one route, one controller, one view (to rule them all and in the darkness bind them) and no duplication or chicanery.

Upvotes: 4

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