# How do I get the URL of the current and other pages? ("restful" problems) **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [May 22, 2008, 11:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-do-i-get-the-url-of-the-current-and-other-pages-restful-problems/138429 "2008-05-22T23:00:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Hadmut](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Hadmut](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Hadmut)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2008, 11:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-do-i-get-the-url-of-the-current-and-other-pages-restful-problems/138429/1 "2008-05-22T23:00:22Z")
Hi, I have to deal with the problem that under “restful routing” the simple scheme of redirecting with parameters stored in variables does not work anymore. The given problem: Plenty of actions/views in a given application contain a button to call a special function programmed in a separate controller, which immediately returns to the page where it came from. With the old version of Rails this was pretty easy: I just passed the current controller, action, and id as parameters, and the special action did a redirect\_to controller, action, id where controller, action, and id were variables. Since rails 2.0 that “restful routing” introduced an illogical URL structure that breaks old functions like link\_to and redirect\_to. Unfortunately, the path is now generated with explicit functions of the pattern action\_model\_path(), which makes it really difficult to stitch old and new scaffolded controllers and view together. Even worse, the URL cannot be generated dynamically from parameters, you need to now the name of the function, and thus what you do at the time of program writing. I’d prefer to not use that “restful routing” since I do not see any advantage over the old scheme. I still wonder why this at all had been taken into rails. Unfortunately, the scaffolding now produces “restful” views and thus makes it hard to avoid it. Thus, I am now looking for a way to generate the URLs for both old- and new style controllers dynamically. I’m afraid that this is impossible. A workaround might be to pass the full rails part of the URL /… as a parameter. How could a function running in a default layout determine the current URL? ---
**Author:** ![Hadmut](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Hadmut](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Hadmut)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2008, 12:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-do-i-get-the-url-of-the-current-and-other-pages-restful-problems/138429/2 "2008-05-23T00:09:19Z")
Hadmut wrote: > Hi, > The given problem: Plenty of actions/views in a given application > contain a button to call a special function programmed in a separate > controller, which immediately returns to the page where it came from. > > With the old version of Rails this was pretty easy: I just passed the > current controller, action, and id as parameters, and the special > action did a > > redirect\_to controller, action, id > > where controller, action, and id were variables. request.request\_uri is the URI of the current request, as a string. Save it in the session. Then you can easily redirect\_to that session variable anytime you like. What if you had more than just :controller/:action/:id? Maybe your route you want to send them back to is more like this? :controller/:action/:id/location/:state/:cityname If you just capture the :controller/:action/:id then you can’t regenerate the route. But since you dont always know what all the params are, you could capture the entire params hash. But that would also capture posted values like the form fields for the model you just created. You don’t want that stuff present in your redirect. These are the reasons you want to capture the URI string, and not the params themselves. > Since rails 2.0 that “restful routing” introduced an illogical URL > structure that breaks old functions like link\_to and redirect\_to. > Unfortunately, the path is now generated with explicit functions of > the pattern > action\_model\_path(), which makes it really difficult to stitch old and > new scaffolded controllers and view together. Even worse, the URL > cannot be generated dynamically from parameters, you need to now the > name of the function, and thus what you do at the time of program > writing. I believe redirect\_to, link\_to, button\_to, etc., still take :controler =\> …, :action =\> … style arguments. On the off chance I am mistaken, you can wrap those hashes in a url\_for(…) to generate a string URI for that combination of params. > I’d prefer to not use that “restful routing” since I do not see any > advantage over the old scheme. I still wonder why this at all had been > taken into rails. Because a world where you create and manage objects in numerous remote databases through a consistent and simple interface where a “thing” has a single url, is a powerful concept. It standardizes controller and view code so you have to think less about it each time you need to manage new object type. And, if you do it right, it gives you an almost free API. > Unfortunately, the scaffolding now produces “restful” views and thus > makes it hard to avoid it. I can definitely see why this would be awkward if you have a lot of non-restful controllers and you are generating scaffolds from the latest rails. That wold get inconsistent pretty quick unless you RESTful-ized your old controllers too. > Thus, I am now looking for a way to generate the URLs for both old- > and new style controllers dynamically. I’m afraid that this is > impossible. A workaround might be to pass the full rails part of the > URL /… as a parameter. How could a function running in a default > layout determine the current URL? As a little test, I tried this is a view I have: \<%=h url\_for(:controller =\> ‘users’, :action =\> ‘show’, :id =\> 1) %\> \<%=h link\_to ‘Sweet’, :controller =\> ‘users’ %\> The result: /users/1 [Sweet](https://www.ruby-forum.com/users) This means url\_for, and link\_to, and probably redirect\_to (though I didn’t check it) will accept a hash it can generate routes from. If you are not getting the routes you want out of those, then you may have some issues with ambiguous routes. This happens if you have 2 routes that accept the same requirements. Rails generates a uri for one route, but you really meant a different route. This is why named routes are so awesome. Instead of having to reverse engineer the params hash to figure out the URI, we can explicitly generate a specific route. This makes it easier when you have a lot of complex controllers, and it makes your path generation code much shorter. You don’t need to use the named route generator methods all the time, and to be fair you wouldnt want to when capturing an arbitrary URL. So, make sure you take a good close look at your routes file and make sure that it’s declaring everything that way you want. And RESTfulness is a tad wierd at first, but try it out on a new project, its quite nice when you get your brain around it.