How does rails determine the path from an object?

I have been working on implementing my own ORM. And I was wondering how the rails path helper extracts the ID from the object. For example how would I make this work for my ORM?

@contact = Contact.first

contact_path(@contact)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

These end up calling polymorphic_path and the magic term here is active model. Active model is 2 things: reusable modules dealing with things such as validations, dirty attributes etc. and a protocol that classes should conform to. It's the latter you're interested in. There are only a handful of methods you have to implement, including (from memory) to_param, new_record? And a few others. There's also an ActiveModel::Lint module that tests that your implementations of these primitives are valid. Once you have that you should be able to use the URL helpers, do stuff such as form_for(@contact) and so on

Fred