How to add a custom RESTful route to a Rails app?

Question

I'm reading these two pages

1. resources
2. Adding more RESTful actions

The Rails Guides page shows

map.resources :photos, :new => { :upload => :post } 

And its corresponding URL

/photos/upload 

This looks wonderful.

---

My routes.rb shows this

map.resources :users, :new => { :signup => :get, :register => :post } 

When I do: [~/my_app]$ rake routes

I see the two new routes added

  signup_new_user GET    /users/new/signup(.:format) register_new_user POST   /users/new/register(.:format) 

Note the inclusion of /new! I don't want that. I just want /users/signup and /users/register (as described in the Rails Routing Guide).

Any help?

Answer 1

When you expose a controller as a resource, following actions are automatically added:

show index new create edit update destroy 

These actions can be categorized in to two groups:

• :member actions

The URL for the member action has the id of the target resource. E.g:

users/1/edit  users/1 

You can think of :member action as an instance method on a class. It always applies on an existing resource.

Default member actions: show, edit, update, destroy

• :collection actions

The URL for the :collection action does not contain the id of the target resource. E.g:

users/login users/register 

You can think of :collection action as a static method on a class.

Default collection actions: index, new, create

In your case you need two new actions for registration. These actions belong to :collection type( as you do not have the id of the user while submitting these actions). Your route can be as follows:

map.resources :users, :collection => { :signup => :get, :register => :post } 

The URL for the actions are as follows:

users/signup users/register 

If you want to remove a standard action generated by Rails use :except/:only options:

map.resources :foo, :only => :show  map.resources :foo, :except => [:destroy, :show] 

Edit 1

I usually treat the confirmation action as a :member action. In this case params[id] will contain the confirmation code.

Route configuration:

map.resources :users, :member => { :confirm => :get} 

URL

/users/xab3454a/confirm  confirm_user_path(:id => @user.confirmation_code) # returns the URL above 

Controller

class UsersController < ApplicationController   def confirm     # assuming you have an attribute called `confirmation_code` in `users` table      # and you have added a uniq index on the column!!     if User.find_by_confirmation_code(params[id])       # success     else       # error     end   end end 

Answer 2

This can be taken as just another syntax -- something good to know may be.

Syntax 1:

resources :users do   member do     get 'signup'     post 'register'   end end 

Rake Route Output will include

signup_users GET    /users/signup(.:format)    {:action=>"signup", :controller=>"users"} register_users POST   /users/register(.:format)  {:action=>"register", :controller=>"use 

rs"}

Syntax 2: If you have only one collection route

resources :users do     get 'signup', :on => :collection end