Routing nested resources in Rails 3

Question

I have a pretty common case for nested routes, I feel like, that looks something like this (in some sort of pseudonotation):

\'/:username/photos\' => Show         


        

Answer 1

The best way to do this depends on the application, but in my case it is certainly Option B. Using namespaced routes I'm able to use a module to keep different concerns separated out into different controllers in a very clean way. I'm also using a namespace-specific controller to add shared functionality to all controllers in a particular namespace (adding, for example, a before_filter to check for authentication and permission for all resources in the namespace).

Answer 2

I did something similar to this in one of my apps. You're on the right track. What I did was declare nested resources, and build the query using the flexible arel-based syntax of Active Record in Rails 3. In your case it might look something like this:

# config/routes.rb
resources :photos, :only => :index
resources :users do
  resources :photos
end

# app/controllers/photos_controller.rb
def index
  @photos = Photo.scoped
  @photos = @photos.by_user(params[:user_id]) if params[:user_id]
  # ...
end

Answer 3

Example::Application.routes.draw do
  resources :accounts, :path => '' do
    resources :projects, :path => '', :except => [:index]
  end
end

Got the example from: http://jasoncodes.com/posts/rails-3-nested-resource-slugs

Just applied that in my current project.

Answer 4

You could define a seperate route for getting the photos for one user like so:

get '(:username)/photos', :to => 'photos#index'

But I would advise just using the nested resource that Jimmy posted above since that is the most flexible solution.

Answer 5

Have you considered using a shallow nested route in this case?

Shallow Route Nesting At times, nested resources can produce cumbersome URLs. A solution to this is to use shallow route nesting:

resources :products, :shallow => true do
  resources :reviews
end

This will enable the recognition of the following routes:

/products/1 => product_path(1)
/products/1/reviews => product_reviews_index_path(1)
/reviews/2 => reviews_path(2)