# Routing strategy question **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [June 6, 2008, 12:05am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/routing-strategy-question/139681 "2008-06-06T00:05:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![suer\_rick](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/bc8723/32.png) [@suer\_rick](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/suer_rick)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2008, 12:05am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/routing-strategy-question/139681/1 "2008-06-06T00:05:34Z")
If I have a site with pages “/home”, “/news”, “/links”, etc. I’m trying to decide the best routing strategy. This is different than the resource mapping used by the scaffold. For example, you would never want to add a new home, or delete a home, etc. I could have a “pages” controller with actions home, news, links. Then I could add a route so that “/home” maps to “/pages/home”. Or I could have separate controllers, and each controller only has an index method. (A home controller, a news controller, etc.) In this case, no routes are added to routes.rb. This must be a common situation…what is the best way to handle it? ---
**Author:** ![suer\_rick](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/bc8723/32.png) [@suer\_rick](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/suer_rick)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2008, 6:53am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/routing-strategy-question/139681/2 "2008-06-06T06:53:19Z")
Rick, Good question. I think there are a lot of ways to get the job done here. One method I’ve used in the past is to generate a “pages” controller (or ‘static’, or whatever you want to call it) and then create named routes for my individual pages. So for your situation I would put this in my routes file: map.root :controller =\> ‘pages’, :action =\> ‘home’ (map.root creates the route for ‘/’) map.news ‘news’, :controller =\> ‘pages’, :action =\> ‘news’ map.links ‘links’, :controller =\> ‘pages’, :action =\> ‘links’ map.links ‘about-us’, :controller =\> ‘pages’, :action =\> ‘about\_us’ The only thing you have to do is make sure you have a home.html.erb, news.html.erb, and links.html.erb in the app/views/pages directory. There are many other ways to solve this problem, and I would also be curious to see what others recommend. Josh S. recently blogged about this here [has\_many :through - simple pages](http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2008/4/2/simple-pages). That’s another way of doing it, although I prefer using named routes generally because I like having more control over the way my url looks (I can tell my URL to say ‘about-us’ instead of ‘about\_us’), but either way is completely legit I think. For a more advanced solution to this problem, also check out Ryan B. Railscast on dynamically generating named routes. It’s more of an a cool example of the dynamic nature of Ruby (generating a method at run-time == very cool) but it may be what you’re looking for. > **[\#79 Generate Named Routes - RailsCasts](http://railscasts.com/episodes/79-generate-named-routes)** > > Short Ruby on Rails screencasts containing tips, tricks and tutorials. Great for both novice and experienced web developers. Hope all this helped and I’ll check back to see what other say in this thread. I know there are a lot of ways to skin a cat here. – Josh N. Abbott > **[Untitled](https://www.tumblr.com/thereverend)** > > Follow @thereverend and get more of the good stuff by joining Tumblr today. Dive in! P.S. Cool tip: Next time you’re in console and you’ve just added a named route or resource to your routes.rb and you want to see if it works simply type app.get ‘/about-us’ (or whatever your relative path would look like. You’ll get back a status code telling you if it was found (200) or not (404). You don’t even have to have the controller. It’ll run straight off routes.rb. Rick S. wrote: > If I have a site with pages “/home”, “/news”, “/links”, etc. I’m > trying to decide the best routing strategy. This is different than > the resource mapping used by the scaffold. For example, you would > never want to add a new home, or delete a home, etc. > > I could have a “pages” controller with actions home, news, links. > Then I could add a route so that “/home” maps to “/pages/home”. > > Or I could have separate controllers, and each controller only has an > index method. (A home controller, a news controller, etc.) In this > case, no routes are added to routes.rb. > > This must be a common situation…what is the best way to handle it? ---
**Author:** ![suer\_rick](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/bc8723/32.png) [@suer\_rick](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/suer_rick)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2008, 8:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/routing-strategy-question/139681/3 "2008-06-06T08:45:21Z")
Rick, Your suggestion seems good, and is what I did recently in a project: map.root :controller =\> “home” map.home ‘:page’, :controller =\> ‘home’, :action =\> ‘show’, :page =\> /about|contact/ see here : [http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2008/4/2/simple-pages](http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2008/4/2/simple-pages) ---
**Author:** ![suer\_rick](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/bc8723/32.png) [@suer\_rick](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/suer_rick)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2008, 8:39am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/routing-strategy-question/139681/4 "2008-06-06T08:39:58Z")
what about in restful? example in pages controller has def news, links, about-us, can your way above work for restful method?? like news\_path but it is in pages controller inorder the route.rb contains map.resources :pages Thank you Reinhart