Though I'm very new to Rails, I've been chugging along with the tutorials that are available. They're quite fun. While building my own web apps, I've decided to use a different URL scheme than the default controller/action/id scheme Rails defaults to.
For instance, I'm working on cloning a small section of YubNub, where URLs like http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=gim+dogs redirects the user to a Google Images query for dogs. When most of the activity will take place in one action (parse), there doesn't seem to be a good way for Rails to delegate actions. Because there is no real route for Rails to follow to get to the many actions (command=google, command=yahoo, command=ask), I can't just tell the various methods to render or redirect_to those actions. Also, any HTML forms I have in place cannot access an action unless there is a route to it. This makes sense--how else would the browser know which URL to send the form information?
Another example would be creating a wiki, where the default action should be to show a wiki page, but routing overrides any request to do things like http://site.com/wiki/SomePage?action=edit or http://site.com/wiki/SomePage?action=delete.
Currently, I've been cutting and pasting the code from action methods such as show, edit, destroy, and so on into one really big index method. I know this is slipping into spaghetti code territory, so I want to know if there is a better way of doing this.
Initial code as routed for controller/action/id URL scheme http://site.com/parser/command.
def index respond_to { |format| format.html } end
def google respond_to { |format| format.html } end
def yahoo respond_to { |format| format.html } end
def ask respond_to { |format| format.html } end
Code after combining into single action for use with URL scheme http://site.com/?command=<service>\.
def index case params[:command] when "google" respond_to { |format| format.html } # google stuff... when "yahoo" respond_to { |format| format.html } # yahoo stuff ... when "ask" respond_to { |format| format.html| # ask stuff ... end end
