Implicit routing to nested collections

I've recently filed an enhancement request to allow drawing nested route urls that are more user and search engine friendly. The ticket is here: http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/436-implied-routes-to-nested-collections

I'm seeking feedback. There's a plugin to enable easy experimentation, and a patch to rails, both hosted on github and linked from the ticket.

This patch really works best when using "pretty urls" and results in a url like so: /local/categories/restaurants/subcategories/korean/states/california/ cities/mountain-view/businesses/totoro-tofu-house

to become: /local/restaurants/korean/california/mountain-view/totoro-tofu-house

By changing your routes from this: map.namespace :local do |local|   local.resources :categories do |categories|     categories.resources :subcategories do |subcategories|       subcategories.resources :states do |states|         states.resources :cities do |cities|           cities.resources :businesses         end       end     end   end end

to this: map.namespace :local do |local|   local.resources :categories, :default => true, :show => :subcategories do |categories|     categories.resources :subcategories, :show => :states do | subcategories>       subcategories.resources :states, :show => :cities do |states|         states.resources :cities, :show => :businesses do |cities|           cities.resources :businesses         end       end     end   end end

Clearly this approach results in a routing collision of the show action and the index action and you can control which one will get precedence in the routing table by using :show or :default. In all cases, both routes gets written so that the named routes work as expected, even though they both are recognized as the same.

Thanks, Chris

I think this would be extremely useful. I created a fairly hackish monkey patch to Rails to use in a few projects that supports a new method called "root_resources" which would basically just eliminate that corresponding path segment. However it looks like your method is much more clean and I'll start to use your plugin immediately, but would like to see this in Rails core.

In general I feel there are some flexibility issues with the current Rails resource routing system that I find myself hacking around when implementing any sufficiently complex application, and this addition would go a long way towards eliminating them.

Aside from nested resources such as in your example, this might also be useful in many other situations, such as allowing the root of a project to directly represent a resource not unlike how twitter works with URLs like http://twitter.com/rubiety. Using this plugin you could define (at the bottom of the routes file!):

map.resources :users, :default => true do   ... end

And have users_url('rubiety') directly generate http://twitter.com/rubiety rather than force it to be something like http://twitter.com/users/rubiety.

+1

I'm glad you got the point of :default, that's why I chose that name.

You can also use :default to merge several resources into the same namespace and use routing requirements to distinguish the correct controller based on the fine structure of the identifiers, e.g. a zip code is 5 digits and a city is not, so assuming your controllers are read only (e.g. you're using admin controllers for creation of data) you can lump both zip codes and cities under states without any need for an extra scope.

I know it may not seem like a big deal, but when you're building an search engine optimized website, these are the types of small things that can make the difference between being on the first page of results and the second.

-chris

Great plugin! I plan on using this and I am hoping you could elaborate on how to use :default to merge resources into the same namespace?

You can also use :default to merge several resources into the same namespace and use routing requirements to distinguish the correct controller based on the fine structure of the identifiers

I have a routing issue similar to your example, only my routes are formatted in this order state, city, category, subcategory, businesses. And I would like to add an addition mapping for state, city, keword, businesses. Is there a way to do this with your plugin?

Thank for you help,

Kevin Beck

Hi Kevin,

Glad you like it!

elaborate on how to use :default to merge resources into the same namespace?

  map.namespace :merged do |merged|     merged.root :controller => "merged", :action => "index"     merged.resources :zipcodes, :default => true, :requirements => {:id => /\d{5}/}     merged.resources :states, :default => true   end

Is there a way to do this with your plugin?

Probably. But I'm not sure what urls you want and what you've tried so far that didn't work. Go ahead and reply directly to me with more details and I'll help you out.

-Chris