link_to one page but controller from another in Rails

Question

I've seen some similar questions on stack but I don't think this is a duplicate as each answer I've gottent has been specific to one underlying problem.

Ill keep it simple. I'd like to know how to click a link, have it take the user to one page but execute a def from another. This is in a rails application of a web crawler and Its something I thought would be quite simple but turned nasty on me.

At the moment I have:

<td><%= link_to 'Crawl!', crawl_path  :controller => :crawl, :action => :crawl  %>

This takes the user to the crawler's index page after its done running. What I would like to do is redirect them to a different page. Namely jobs_path which shows a list of the crawlers sites and status (this is working fine, I just want to included it for relevance). If I try it like this:

<td><%= link_to 'Crawl!', jobs_path,  :controller => :crawl, :action => :crawl  %>

The user is directed to the jobs page but the crawler script never ran and thus the jobs list was never update. For the record, each job is just a url and the depth that it lies at.

Is this just a syntactical error or am I miles off the mark?

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

What have you set your redirect_to in crawl#crawl as? Perhaps set it to redirect to jobs_path upon completion?