"How To: Uncountable Names in RESTful Routes" by trevor

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:03:23 EST

A couple of times I’ve noticed people saying that uncountable names (like sheep and fish) can’t be used with resource routes in Rails. Well, they can.

# in config/routes.rb
map.resources :fish

In the above example there is a conflict between the generated url helpers for the ‘fish’ collection and the generated url helpers for members of the ‘fish’ collection. Because ‘fish’ is uncountable, both are called fish_path or fish_url. And because of the way routes and url helpers are created in a map.resources call, the member url helpers override the collection ones.

So using the above example, calling fish_path() raises an error like:

ActionController::RoutingError: fish_url failed to generate from {:controller=>"fish", :action=>"show"} - you may have ambiguous routes, or you may need to supply additional parameters for this route. content_url has the following required parameters: ["fish", :id] - are they all satisifed?

Thankfully that’s not the end of it. You just have to add a :singular argument when defining your resources:

# in config/routes.rb
map.resources :fish, :singular => :fish_instance

# in your code
fish_path() #=> /fish
new_fish_instance_path() #=> /fish/new
fish_instance_path(1) #=> /fish/1
edit_fish_instance_path(1) #=> /fish/1;edit

That’s all.

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"How To: Uncountable Names in RESTful Routes" by trevor