# Combining controller actions

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/combining-controller-actions/145258>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [August 7, 2008, 9:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/combining-controller-actions/145258 "2008-08-07T09:04:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![MC\_Andre](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/96bed5/32.png) [@MC\_Andre](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/MC_Andre)\
**Post date:** [August 7, 2008, 9:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/combining-controller-actions/145258/1 "2008-08-07T09:04:44Z")

</div>

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](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](http://site.com/wiki/SomePage?action=edit) or  
[http://site.com/wiki/SomePage?action=delete](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](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=](http://site.com/?command=).

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