RESTful Rails 3 routing

Question

I'm new to RESTful design and confused: if I make PUT, GET or POST to a same resource, say, /weblogs/myweblog, how should I write in the route.rb, and related controller? Does the following works? In route.rb

match 'weblogs/myweblog/new' => 'weblogs#create_new_blog'
match 'weblogs/myweblog/edit/:id' => 'weblogs#edit_blog' 
.
.

In weblogs_controller.rb

def create_new_blog
   ...
end

def edit_blog
  params[:id]..
  ....
end

and confused if I want to do GET/PUT/POST on the same resource, if their URL is same but only HTTP request is different, how to write different operations in the controller?

Answer 1

In general it's best to define your routes in terms of resources, so if you have a resource named webblog , your routes can be defined using just:

resources :weblogs

If you check the routes generated by this (with rake routes ), you will see that it defines a standard set of mappings from GET , PUT , POST and DELETE actions on urls to controller actions:

   webblogs GET    /weblogs(.:format)         weblogs#index
            POST   /weblogs(.:format)         weblogs#create
new_webblog GET    /weblogs/new(.:format)     weblogs#new
    webblog GET    /weblogs/:id(.:format)     weblogs#show
            PUT    /weblogs/:id(.:format)     weblogs#update
            DELETE /weblogs/:id(.:format)     weblogs#destroy

These routes will map to standard controller actions index , create , new , show , etc.

If for whatever reason you want to define routes without using resources , you can define them separately:

get '/weblogs' => 'weblogs#index'
get '/weblogs/new' => 'weblogs#new'
get '/weblogs/:id/edit' => 'weblogs#edit'
put '/weblogs/:id' => 'weblogs#update'
...

By defining routes with get , put etc. you can map a single URL to multiple controller actions, eg like this:

get '/weblogs/myweblog' => 'weblogs#show_myweblog'
put '/weblogs/myweblog' => 'weblogs#update_myweblog'
post '/weblogs/myweblog' => 'weblogs#create_myweblog'
destroy '/weblogs/myweblog' => 'weblogs#destroymy_weblog'

This will map the URL /weblogs/myweblog to the method show_myweblog for a GET request, update_myweblog for a PUT request, create_myweblog for a POST request, and destroy_myweblog for a DELETE request.

Alternatively, using the standard resources , you can pick and choose which routes you want from the full set with the only option:

resources :weblogs, only: [:show, :edit]

See the documentation for more details. I hope this answers your question, if not please provide more details on what you want to do in the comments.