Custom REST routes

Rails
1

Is there any way of getting the nice url methods such as new_page_path
that you get when you declare

map.resource :pages

in routes.rb?

Here is my situation:
I have a Page model with lots of pages that use acts_as_list. This
means that some of the pages are root pages - these are my site’s
sections (tabbed navigation). I would like the urls to look like this:

www.myapp.co.uk/blog/awesome-post

This will take you to a page called ‘awesome-post’ that is a child of
a page called blog. Each page has a parent page (the ‘page_id’ field
in the database).

In routes.rb, I have:

map.page ‘:section/*pages’, :controller => ‘pages’, :action => ‘show’

This works fine and gives me access to params[:section] and an array,
params[:pages] which can be used to find the page I am looking for.

What I want to be able to do is create a new page that is a child of
the ‘programmers’ page using the url

www.myapp.co.uk/about/people/programmers/new

I can then grab params[:pages].last.id and use this to set the page_id
in the create action.

Do I just use
map.new_page ‘*pages/new’, :controller => :pages, :action => ‘new’

Also, how do I ‘fake out’ the put and delete methods manually, if I
want to do similar things to delete pages?

Sorry for the long post.

DAZ

2

I’ve found that if I add the line
map.resources :pages
to routes.rb, then I do get the full REST functionality, but I have to
use urls such as

www.myapp.co.uk/pages/new

What I want is to efectively ‘namespace’ the pages, so you go to

www.myapp.co.uk/blog/new

if you want to add a new child page of blog, and

www.myapp.co.uk/about/people/programmers/new

if I want a new page that is a child of the programmers page, that is
a child of the people page, that is a child of the about page.

Can I do this?

DAZ

3

map.resources :people do
map.resources :programmers
end

will get you “/people/programmers/#{method}”

However, be careful of this going too deep:
http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2007/2/5/nesting-resources

Jason

4

Thanks, but wouldn’t I only do that if people and programmers were
models? The only model is pages - people and programmers are just
examples of what the pages might be, they could be anything.

This route:

map.new ‘*pages/new’, :controller => ‘pages’, :action => ‘new’

allows me to use urls like

www.myapp.co.uk/news/latest/new

I can then use params[:pages].last to grab the page with a permalink
of ‘latest’ and use its id to set the page_id of the new page. This
will mean that the new page is a child of the ‘latest’ page.

Only problem is now that I don’t know where to send the form, with
normal map.resources :pages, it was:
<% form_for(:page, :url => pages_path) do |f| %>

Do I need to write my own create route?
map.create ???
I wouldn’t even know what to put in here since it never actually goes
to an actual page, just accesses the ‘create’ action.

5

map.edit ‘:section/*pages;edit’, :controller => ‘pages’, :action =>
‘edit’

works!

Going to

www.myapp.co.uk/contact;edit

allows you to edit the contact page.

The only thing I don’t know how to do know is what to put in my forms
to access the ‘create’ and ‘update’ actions.
REST would have me use the same url but just using different methods
(POST and PUT respectively), how does map.resources do that???

thanks again,

DAZ