How can I route to different controllers with the same URL format in Rails?

Question

I have two different models that can show up in a category. In my routes.rb, I would like to have something like this:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.top_list ':category/:foo', :controller => 'foo', :action => 'show'
  map.top_list ':category/:bar', :controller => 'bar', :action => 'show'
end

This works fine when I load a URL like "/some-category-name/some-foo-name", where "some-foo-name" can be loaded by the FooController like so:

class FooController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @foo = Foo.find_by_url! params[:foo]
  end
end

But when I try to request a Bar, like "/some-category-name/some-bar-name", I get a "ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound in FooController#show". I know that I can solve this problem by requiring that all Foo names start with "foo-" and all Bar names start with "bar-", then defining routes like this:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.top_list ':category/:foo', :controller => 'foo', :action => 'show', :requirements => { :name => /^foo-/ }
  map.top_list ':category/:bar', :controller => 'bar', :action => 'show', :requirements => { :name => /^bar-/ }
end

But forcing this restriction on names is quite suboptimal. I found the following, which looks like it might work for me: Different routes but using the same controller for model subclasses in Rails. However, I don't quite follow the example, so I don't know if this would solve my problem. It is also not great that my Foo and BarController would have to inherit from CategoryController.

One thought that occurred to me is that I could try to look up the Foo, then fall back to the BarController if that fails. I can easily do this in the FooController and redirect to the BarController, but this is not really OK, since all the requests for Bars will be logged as FooController#show in the Rails log. However, if I could somehow configure the routes to call a method to determine what to route to based on the basename of the URL, I could get the behaviour that I need; e.g.

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  is_a_foo = Proc.new {|name| Foo.find_by_url! name && true }

  map.top_list ':category/:foo', :controller => 'foo', :action => 'show', :requirements => { :name => is_a_foo }
  map.top_list ':category/:bar', :controller => 'bar', :action => 'show'
end

Is there any way to do this in bog-standard Rails 2?

If the following question had an answer, it would also answer this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5767222/rails-call-another-controller-action-from-a-controller — Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com, Oct 23 '14 at 19:37

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 25 '11 at 16:16

I ended up writing a little Rails plugin that allows me to write a route like this:

map.with_options :category => /[-A-Za-z0-9]+/ do |m|
  # Since both foos and bars can appear under category, we define a route for foo that only matches when
  # the foo can be found in the database, then fall back to the bar route
  m.foo ':category/:foo', :controller => 'foo', :action => 'show', :conditions => {
      :url => { :find_by_url => Foo }
  }
  m.bar ':category/:bar', :controller => 'bar', :action => 'show'
end

Until I get permission to open source the code, I have to leave the implementation as an exercise for the reader, but here's how I got there:

I'll update this answer with a github link when I can. :)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 24 '11 at 13:20

0

This seems wrong since you are using the same route to two controllers. Rails will choose one only as you noticed.

It would be nicer to use something like this:

map.top_list ':category/foo/:foo', :controller => 'foo', :action => 'show', :requirements => { :name => is_a_foo }
map.top_list ':category/bar/:bar', :controller => 'bar', :action => 'show'

Since in provided routes you give two params each time. It does not matter that you name them differently. It just matches both.

answered Jan 24 '11 at 13:20

m4risU

1,231
11
14

I agree, it would be nice to to it this way. However, the path is a requirement set by the business folks. :) – Josh Glover Jan 24 '11 at 14:02
so give some examples to those paths, I will take a look tomorrow morning at work, so we could figure it out. There may be two possibilities: 1. You will have to use one controller that will just be somewhat tweaked but only in case :foo and :bar identifiers are unique, for example you could use before_filter 2. There is significant possibility that at least one path hast to be slightly different if identifiers may overlap. – m4risU Jan 25 '11 at 00:06

How can I route to different controllers with the same URL format in Rails?

2 Answers2