Modular routing in rails and merb (acts_as_routing)

Posted on 11/26/2008, 6:29 pm, by warren, under All, Rails.

Here’s a proof of concept plugin that will monkeypatch Rails or Merb routing to allow you to define “acts as blocks” anywhere throughout your application (i.e. a plugin) and then use them in your routes file.
Imagine the plugin acts_as_commentable defines the following in its init.rb:

ActionController::Routing.routes_for_acts_as(:commentable) do |map|
  map.resources :comments
  map.best_comment '/best-comment', :controller => 'comments', :action => 'best'
end

If you added these :acts_as to your config/routes.rb:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.resources :people, :acts_as => [:commentable]
  map.resources :posts, :acts_as => [:commentable]
end

You could then use these routes throughout your application:

  <%=person_comments_path(Person.first)%>
  <%=post_comments_path(Post.first)%>
  <%=person_best_comment_path(Person.first)%>

This is equivalent to doing:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.resources :people do |people_map|
    people_map.resources :comments
    people_map.best_comment '/best-comment', :controller => 'comments', :action => 'best'
  end
  map.resources :posts do |posts_map|
    posts_map.resources :comments
    posts_map.best_comment '/best-comment', :controller => 'comments', :action => 'best'
  end
end

The plugin is available on github: http://github.com/hungrymachine/acts_as_routing/tree/master

P.S. At some point, I’ll submit patches to Rails and Merb so this functionality is native rather than provided via a monkeypatching plugin.

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2 Comments

  1. Randy Schmidt says:
    11/26/2008 at 6:29 pm

    WARREN! This is awesome! :-)

    Reply to this comment
  2. Emanuel Uihlein says:
    02/27/2010 at 9:47 am

    Dont You just Love this ? Its GREAT!! THE BEST!!

    Reply to this comment

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