Rails 5 routing resources using custom actions

Question

About routing, If I do something like this:

resources :students
resources :teachers

I will get something like:

students GET /students(.:format) students#index
...
teachers GET /teachers(.:format) teachers#index
...

Changing to:

resources :students, controller: :users
resources :teachers, controller: :users

will give me:

students GET /students(.:format) users#index
teachers GET /teachers(.:format) users#index

Note that now, both resources are using the same controller Users and the same action index . But what I need, instead of using the same index action, is the students resource to use actions prefixed by students like students_index and teachers resources prefixed by teachers like teacher_index .

In other words, I want bin/rails routes to give me the following output:

students GET /students(.:format) users#students_index
teachers GET /teachers(.:format) users#teachers_index

I know that I can do the same with:

get 'students', to: 'users#students_index'

But there is a way to do the same with resources?

Answer 1

I don't think there's a way to do that with resources helper. What you could do (if it's only the index action you wanna override) is add an except, like this:

resources :students, controller: :users, except: [:index]
resources :teachers, controller: :users, except: [:index]

then, as you already suggested, do the individuals index actions like that:

get 'students', to: 'users#students_index', as: :student
get 'teachers', to: 'users#teachers_index', as: :teacher

Or you could reconsider the structure of your controllers... Good luck!

Answer 2

There is a far better way to do this as you might have surmised - inheritance.

# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController

  delegate :singular, :plural, :param_key, to: :model_name

  before_action :set_resource, only: [:show, :edit, :update, :destroy]
  before_action :set_resources, only: [:index]

  def initialize
    @model_name = resource_class.model_name
    super
  end

  def show
  end

  def index
  end

  def new
    @resource = resource_class.new
    set_resource
  end

  def create
    @resource = resource_class.new(permitted_attributes)

    if @resource.save
      redirect_to @resource
    else
      set_resource
      render :new
    end
  end

  def edit
  end

  def update
    if @resource.update(permitted_attributes)
      redirect_to @resource
    else
      set_resource
      render :edit
    end
  end

  def destroy
    @resource.destroy
    redirect_to action: "index"
  end

  # ...

  private

  # Deduces the class of the model based on the controller name
  # TeachersController would try to resolve Teacher for example.
  def resource_class
    @resource_class ||= controller_name.classify.constantize
  end 

  # will set @resource as well as @teacher or @student
  def set_resource
    @resource ||= resource_class.find(params[:id])
    instance_variable_set("@#{singular}", @resource)
  end

  # will set @resources as well as @teachers or @students
  def set_resources
    @resources ||= resource_class.all
    instance_variable_set("@#{plural}", @resources)
  end

  def permitted_attributes
    params.require(param_key).permit(:a, :b, :c)
  end
end

---

# app/controllers/teachers_controller.rb
class TeachersController < UsersController
end

# app/controllers/students_controller.rb
class StudentsController < UsersController
end

---

# routes.rb
resources :students
resources :teachers

This lets you follow the regular Rails convention over configuration approach when it comes to naming actions and views.

The UsersController base class uses quite a bit of magic through ActiveModel::Naming both to figure out the model class and stuff like what to name the instance variables and the params keys.