This might be more a question for the guys in the “Ruby on Rails: Core”
group, but I’ll try it out here first…
So, while writing a gem (engine) for rails, I found that I needed to
have my
app (in a pre-filter) directly query the router. In the “old” days, this
was
done using ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path(). My 2nd
edition of “Agile Web D. with Rails” (which covers rails 1.2)
even
demonstrates how to use it in a rails console to verify your routes.
This is
now deprecated (in rails 3.0.x) as indicated by the following warning in
my
application log:
DEPRECATION WARNING: ActionController::Routing::Routes is deprecated.
Instead, use Rails.application.routes.
So, today you use Rails.application.routes.recognize_path(). Beautiful.
It
works great.
However, when trying to re-learn or re-discover this method (I hadn’t
used
it in quite a while) I noticed it isn’t documented (
http://api.rubyonrails.org/). Rails.application.routes returns an
instance
of the ActionDispatch::Routing::RouteSet class which, looking at the
source,
has the “#:nodoc:” rdoc tag to prevent it being included in the project
documentation.
This communicates to me that this isn’t considered part of the public
API
and is therefor subject to change, be renamed, whatever.
So my question is, is this true? Since I’m writing a gem, a rails engine
that needs to call this method, am I in danger of a future rails point
release breaking my gem? Or, is the lack of documentation superfluous
and I
can be assured that this method:
Rails.application.routes.recognize_path(path,
environment = {}) will always be available (with that signature and
behavior)?