Ruby on Rails conditional routing

Question

I have a site listing many jobs, but I also want each account to be able to access its jobs in one place. Thus, I am using these routes:

map.resources :jobs
map.resource :account, :has_many => :jobs

This gets me URLs like localhost/jobs/ and localhost/account/jobs. However, both seem to render JobsController::index. How can I either make a conditional in the index action (how do I access whether account/jobs or just jobs was specified in the URL?) or change the account route to render a different action? What's the proper way to do this?

Answer 1

If you run "rake routes" you should see something like this

account_jobs  GET    /accounts/:account_id/jobs/:job_id    {:controller => 'jobs', :action => 'index'}

This means when your action is called via the /account/jobs route you should have an :account_id parameter. You can then do your logic switch based on the existence of this param:

if params[:account_id].nil?
   ...
else
   ...
end

Answer 2

Adding a requirement to the resource definition allows you to pass extra parameters

map.resources :jobs
map.resource :account, :has_many => :jobs, :requirements => {:account => true}

Then params[:account] will be set if the routing url was 'http://www.mysite.tld/account/jobs' and unset if it it was 'http://www.mysite.tld/jobs'

As with all other restful routing the action depends on the context.

• GET requests without an id route to index.
• GET requests with an id route to show
• POST requests route to create
• PUT requests route to update
• DELETE requests route to destroy.

Answer 3

You can use a block when creating your routes, and then pass a :controller parameter, like so

map.resource :account do |account|
  # If you have a special controller 'AccountJobsController'
  account.resources :jobs, :controller => "account_jobs"
end

It may be cleaner for you to put your controllers into a directory structure, and then you can reference them in a nested way. For example:

map.resource :account do |account|
  account.resources :jobs, :controller => "accounts/jobs"
end

If you use the above snippet, you should then create a controller in app/controllers/accounts/jobs_controller.rb, which is defined like so:

class Account::JobsController < ApplicationController
  ##
  ## etc.
  ##
end

You can always use rake routes to check which routes have been generated and which controllers they'll use.