Rails 3 resource routes with dots; or, how to make a Ruby developer go a little bit insane
This one cost me at least an hour of frustration.
So apparently the Rails router has considered the dot (“.”) to be a “separator” character along with the slash (“/”) since version 1.2. I don’t know in what context this ever seemed like a good idea, but whatever. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to bite you every day, but when it does it will be in very weird ways. To wit:
First, a simple routes.rb.
resources :users do
resources :projects
end
Fill in some typical values, and you get a path:
irb(main):009:0> app.user_projects_path("avdi")
=> "/users/avdi/projects"
Now fill in a value with a period in it, and watch it explode:
irb(main):010:0> app.user_projects_path("avdi.grimm")
ActionController::RoutingError: No route matches {
:user_id=>"avdi.grimm", :action=>"create", :controller=>"projects"
}
:action => "create"? What?!! Who said anything about create?!
As it turns out, there is an invocation in your routes file which will fix this:
resources :users, :constraints => { :id => /.*/ } do
resources :projects
end
irb(main):013:0> app.user_projects_path("avdi.grimm")
=> "/users/avdi.grimm/projects"
Now I know what you’re thinking. “That’s so obvious, why didn’t he think of that immediately?” What can I say, some days I’m slow.
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