Rails routing, matching short urls?

Question

I'm having an issue where I've created a route I'm using to match short token like urls, like this:

myapp.com/a2c3b

I'm doing that by using a route like this:

match '/:id' => 'items#show', :as => "show_item", :via => :get, :constraints => { :id => /[a-z0-9]{5}/ }

But the issue is that now my other routes like /admin don't work because that also has 5 characters, how can I work around this, and have both kinds of routes work?

Answer 1

Put all of your routes that would match before this route in the file... that is...

match '/admin'....
match '/login'....
match '/:id' => 'items#show', :as => "show_item", :via => :get, :constraints => { :id => /[a-z0-9]{5}/ }