Ruby on Rails 3: Change default controller and parameter order in routing

Question

I have a Rails app that has a controller called domain which has a nested controller called subdomain and stats. I have defined them in routes.rb:

resources :domains do
    resources :subdomains, :stats
end

I have changed the to_param of the domain and subdomain models to use the name of the domain, e.g.: the routing I get is http://site/domains/foo/subdomains/bar.

I would like to tidy it up to so that instead of using http://site/domains/foo/subdomains/bar I could access it with just http://site/foo/subdomains/bar. I have tried the following in routes.rb:

match "/:id/" => "domains#show", :as => :domain

Which works fine, but it only gives me the ability to use the path http://site/foo but for example http://site/foo/subdomains/bar doesn't. I could create match lines for every respective model and nested model but that does nothing to other helpers besides domain_url - i.e. edit_domain_url points to /domains/foo/edit/ instead of /foo/edit.

Is there a way to change the routing so that the resources generates helpers that point to the root url without the 'domains' part?

Answer 1

The single match in your routes creates only one route. Resource helpers create many routes at once. Luckily there are a lot of options for customisation. If you want to omit /domains/ from your paths, it's as simple as:

resources :domains, :path => "/" do
  resources :subdomains, :stats
end

With the above in config/routes.rb, running rake routes says the following:

    domain_subdomains GET    /:domain_id/subdomains(.:format)         
    domain_subdomains POST   /:domain_id/subdomains(.:format)         
 new_domain_subdomain GET    /:domain_id/subdomains/new(.:format)     
edit_domain_subdomain GET    /:domain_id/subdomains/:id/edit(.:format)
     domain_subdomain GET    /:domain_id/subdomains/:id(.:format)     
     domain_subdomain PUT    /:domain_id/subdomains/:id(.:format)     
     domain_subdomain DELETE /:domain_id/subdomains/:id(.:format)     
         domain_stats GET    /:domain_id/stats(.:format)              
         domain_stats POST   /:domain_id/stats(.:format)              
      new_domain_stat GET    /:domain_id/stats/new(.:format)          
     edit_domain_stat GET    /:domain_id/stats/:id/edit(.:format)     
          domain_stat GET    /:domain_id/stats/:id(.:format)          
          domain_stat PUT    /:domain_id/stats/:id(.:format)          
          domain_stat DELETE /:domain_id/stats/:id(.:format)          
              domains GET    /(.:format)                              
              domains POST   /(.:format)                              
           new_domain GET    /new(.:format)                           
          edit_domain GET    /:id/edit(.:format)                      
               domain GET    /:id(.:format)                           
               domain PUT    /:id(.:format)                           
               domain DELETE /:id(.:format)                           

Looks like all the routes you need!