Using the 404 for Missing Routes and Actions

rubyonrails-talk
1

I've tried searching the list for this but I'm not really sure what Rails would call it. Basically what I'm wanting to do is to help against users changing the URL string, or to help users with expired bookmarks from the previous version of the site. When a method doesn't exist or an action on a method rather then showing "Routing Error" or "Unknown Action" I want to be able to either forward that to the 404 error page or just redirect it to my home controller's index action. How would one go about doing this?

Regards,

Tim

2

There may be a more elegant way, but this works:

Create a controller with an action that returns a 404 (or an action that would redirect to your home page whatever that is or whatever else you want to happen)

class ErrorsController < ApplicationController   def not_found     render :file => "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/404.html", :layout => false, :status => 404   end end

then put a catch-all route to this at the end of /config/routes.rb:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|   # snip   map.connect '*path', :controller => 'errors', :action => 'not_found' end

Any input that a miscreant user enters that doesn't match a route will be caught by this final route and cause the not_found action to fire.

3

Those development stack traces are only shown in development mode, or in production mode IF the request is from the local web server. Look at extending #rescue_action_in_public to suit your needs:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/browser/branches/1-2-stable/actionpack/lib/action_controller/rescue.rb#L50

I don't know if there are any decent tutorials written on it though. But if there aren't, they should be written for edge which improves this a lot IMO:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/browser/trunk/actionpack/lib/action_controller/rescue.rb#L90

You can easily define a status code and rendered template for custom exceptions without overwriting the method.