CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsroutes
jim
jim

Reputation: 49

Rails: routes.rb and omitting the controller name

From Hartl's Rails Tutorial Book, some routes for static pages are automatically generated:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  get  'static_pages/home'
  get  'static_pages/help'
  root 'application#hello'
end

Why do the 'home' and 'help' routes not have the controller#action?
E.g. get 'static_pages/home', to: 'static_pages_controller#home'

The closest documentation of this I could find was in the the Rails Guides routing page's static segments section.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 464

Answers (2)

ollpu
ollpu

Reputation: 1873

After browsing through some documentation, and finding nothing relevant, I had a look at the source. It seems that the match method (which get is a shorthand for) is calling get_to_from_path (defined here), which extracts the controller and method information from the provided path, if to: isn't provided.

So, for this scenario, this

get 'static_pages/home'
get 'static_pages/help'

gets mapped to static_pages#home, and static_pages#help. Using dashes (-) instead of underscores (_) in the path would work as well.

It is weird that this functionality is not documented, and more so that it is used in a tutorial without explanation.

Upvotes: 0

kcdragon
kcdragon

Reputation: 1733

The routes

get  'static_pages/home'
get  'static_pages/help'

do not have a controller/action associated with them because the contents of those pages are not generated dynamically from the controller. They are most likely defined on the file system at public/static_pages/home and public/static_pages/help. The public directory can be used to serve static content directly without using controllers.

Edit:

If static_pages does refer to a controller then most likely Rails is able to derive the name of the controller and the name of the action when you create a route of the form <name of controller>/<name of action. Rails just assumes that the left hand side of the "/" is the controller and the right hand side is the action.

Upvotes: 0

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