Really simple routing question

Rails
1

I’m just now trying to figure out how rails routing works and to be
honest, I find it really confusing. Anyway, I just want to create two
“named” routes to save me some typing. The routes are:

map.home ‘’, :controller => ‘main’, :action => ‘welcome’
map.login ‘’, :controller => ‘user’, :action => ‘login’

What happens is that when I do “redirect_to login_url”, the first
route is invoked. If I comment that first one out, then the second one
starts working. Aren’t they in different namespaces? Why are they
conflicting?

2

Your routes are identical in the location that is rendered. The way you
have
it now any request that goes to http://www.yourdomain.com/ will use the
map.home route since it is first in the list.

try changing to something like:
map.home ‘’, :controller => ‘main’, :action => ‘welcome’
map.login ‘/login’, :controller => ‘user’, :action => ‘login’

The first argument is the url that is generated and must be unique. The
controller and action definitions tell rails where to go when that url
comes
in. If you have duplicates then the first item found in the routes file
will
be used. Read up on routes and howw they work here (
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Routes ) to get a better
understanding.

  • Adam
3

Adam, thanks for the clarification. It’s definitely something I will
need to learn in depth. Thanks a lot for the post. By the way, I was
thinking about how I would go about creating a catchall route and I
found this on the net:

map.connect ‘*path’, :controller => “some_controller”, :action =>
“some_action”

That star can’t be a regular expression star, so what is it and do you
know where I could read about those details?

Thanks once again,
Sergei

4

Funny you should ask about that. I stumbled across something similar and
use
the catchall for my 404’s. I didn’t really look into how it works at the
time.

catch all…

map.whoops ‘*anything’, :controller => ‘default’, :action => ‘whoops’

I did find this though and it may clarify the use of the *.

-Adam

5

#46 Catch-all Route - RailsCasts

It’s funny that this is where I found it too! Thanks Adam, I’ll look
into it.

Sergei