I’m taking my first real steps into Rails with a pet project. It’s exciting and fun and I make a lot of wrong steps along the way. The most recent revolves around routing. Here’s a brief bit. I have two models, breweries and beers. (We side project what we love right?) Breweries have many beers, but beers can be viewed on their own. At first, I had my routes laid out like this:

resources :beers
resources :breweries do
  resources :beers
end

That all works well. I can route to /beers/1/beers and /beers. The only problem is the views for beer create links that always go back to the initial /beers route. The new, show, edit, etc. all break out of the route that includes the brewery id. The obvious fix is to just do this in the view.

<%= link_to 'new' , ( params[:brewery_id].nil? ? new_brewery_beer_path : new_beer_path ) %>

That is pretty lame though right? Shouldn’t we maybe move that to the helper?

def via_brewery?
  !params[:brewery_id].nil?
end

def new_path
  if via_brewery? 
    return new_brewery_beer_path(:brewery_id => params[:brewery_id]) 
  else
    return new_beer_path
  end
end

Better. Not super lame, but still messy. We still need functions for each type of route and that doesn’t feel very DRY. So what to do.

I thought it might be finding that /beers route because it appears first, and maybe if I change that order, things might work better.

resources :breweries do
  resources :beers
end
resources :beers

Well you know what? It does work! It looks through those routes in order. When you’re visiting via the /beers route, you don’t have a :brewery_id so that first route gets skipped, and we get the second. When we have the id, we get the first route. Now we have a much simpler view.

<%= link_to 'new', :controller => :beers, :action => :new %>

Much much better! The more I use Ruby and Rails, but more I love it. Something like that in .Net would have been much more difficult.