How do I use the Rails helper link_to RESTfully in this situation?

Question

I basically want to use link_to to link to the index method of a controller. I tried:

<%= link_to 'Recipes', Recipe %>

but that outputs:

<a href="/recipes/Recipe">Recipes</a>

Which is clearly not right, if it left off that last bit it would do exactly what I want it to. I thought that with RESTful stuff I somehow would start to leave out the action or something like that. What am I misunderstanding?

Answer 1

With the restful routes, the majority of the time you're expected to call a helper method to generate the route.

eg:

link_to 'Recipes', recipes_path

There is an optimization where you can just pass in a recipe object, and it will call the helper method for you behind the scenes: eg:

link_to 'Recipe X', @recipe

is the same as

link_to 'Recipe X', recipe_path(@recipe)

However, it's just a special case.

What you are doing is passing The recipe class itself, not a valid recipe object. As rails doesn't know to handle this, as a fallback it just calls .to_s on whatever you've given it, and then gives that to recipe_path, which is why you see the strange URL.

Tip: Use the _path helper methods rather than the _url methods.

_url gives you a full URL such as http://stackoverflow.com/recipes/5 whereas _path just gives you /recipes/5.
The problem with the full URL is that a lot of the time in production your rails app is running as a mongrel sitting behind a load balancer, so it thinks it's host name is actually 1.2.3.4 (or whatever the internal LAN IP is) rather than the real URL, and so will serve broken links.