route.rb和控制器

Question

Sorry, I thought I understood this, but now I have to re-evaluate my understanding of routes.rb. Hoping you could help.

A browser request goes to the Application Controller and the Controller tells what to show, right? - what erb file, database stuff, whatever...

In my routes.rb file I have:

 root :to => 'static_pages#FAQ'

Until lately I thought what was happening was: routes.rb is looking at my static_pages_controller.rb file, looking at the FAQ method, and then seeing what to do. If there's nothing in the FAQ method - as is the case - then Rails does its magic and goes to my FAQ.html.erb in my View, the closest thing.

But even if I change the name of:

def FAQ
end

in my controller, or delete the static_pages_controller.rb altogether, it still goes to my FAQ.html.erb file. So does routes.rb not even look at controllers? Does it go straight to 'View' files? Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

static page are served first so that is why FAQ.html.erb is always served.

Also "A browser request goes to the Application Controller and the Controller tells what to show, right? - what erb file, database stuff, whatever..."

I think of it this way: The request first goes through routing, then to the controller for the resource in question, the controller being inherited from application_controller, will then query the model as needed, calculating variables as needed which it then uses in comiling the View page, which are compilation, gets sent as HTML.

Answer 2

Your ideas are essentially correct; Rails will attempt to render the static_page's controller's FAQ method, which implicitly renders the "FAQ" view, if no view (or other output) is explicitly rendered by the action.

What you're missing is that Rails will fill in the blanks if any one of the controller/action pieces is missing. All you need to do is define the view and Rails will assume that you're simply not bothering to define an empty action.

Answer 3

Starting a method name with a capital letter seems like a very bad idea in ruby, because ruby will treat any identifiers that start with a capital letter as a constant. The very first thing I would do personally is change 'FAQ' to 'faq' in my routes and controller code. If you really want to have 'FAQ' capitalized in the browser url, you can probably accomplish that via something like:

root :to => static_pages#faq, :as => 'FAQ'

To check that your method is getting called, use the logger:

def faq
   Rails.logger.warn "faq method did get called after all"
end