CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-rails
EastsideDev
EastsideDev

Reputation: 6639

Additional route in Rails?

Rails 5.2.2

In my routes.rb file, I have:

resources :users, only: [:index, :new, :create, :update] do
  put 'disable', on: :member
end

When I do rake routes, I get:

disable_user PUT    /users/:id/disable(.:format) users#disable
       users GET    /users(.:format)             users#index
             POST   /users(.:format)             users#create
    new_user GET    /users/new(.:format)         users#new
        user PATCH  /users/:id(.:format)         users#update
             PUT    /users/:id(.:format)         users#update

Why do I have a duplicate of the update route? or this just a visual artifact of the rake route command?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 28

Answers (1)

max
max

Reputation: 102213

Rails originally only used the PUT http verb for updates. In 2012 PATCH was declared the new primary HTTP method for updates because of the semantics of how IETF defines PUT.

Now let’s say a web application has an Invoice model with a paid flag that indicates whether the invoice has been paid. How do you set that flag in a RESTful way? Submitting paid=1 via PUT to /invoices/:id does not conform to HTTP semantics, because such request would not be sending a complete representation of the invoice for replacement.

The entire discussion on the hows and why's can be found in issue #348.

However for legacy compatibility reasons the resources and resource macros still generate a PUT route. This was a better compromise than breaking the Rails router to treat PUT and PATCH identically.

Why this legacy compatibility still is here in 2019 is another really good question.

Upvotes: 2

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