Why isn't my 'join' action working, it says the action 'show' can't be found

Question

In my UserController I have:

def join
end

I have a join.html.erb in my /views/user/ folder.

My routes has a :

resources :user

When I go to:

http://localhost:3000/user/join

I get:

The action 'show' could not be found for UserController

Answer 1

Place:

def show
end

in your UserController.

To be certain:

app/controllers/users_controller.rb

def join
end

app/views/users/join.html.erb

config/routes.rb

resources :users

Answer 2

Re: why isn't the join action found?

To answer your specific question, what's happening is that you want to have an action "join" for your User model.

Your problem is that you haven't defined a route matching the url http://localhost:3000/user/join

The line resources :user in your routes file only defines routes for the seven standard rest verbs/actions:

index, new, create, show, edit, update, destroy

See: http://apidock.com/rails/ActionController/Resources/resources

Added: to fix, you'll need to add an explicit or generic route. Routing docs

Added: Re: why am I seeing the error message re show? To be ultra-precise, the route selector "GET /usr/:id" (created by your resource call) is being used to select the SHOW action for the User resource. The :id value is being set to "join". Since you don't have a Show method defined in your controller, that's the error that you're seeing.

Answer 3

You're using resources, but have a non-REST action, so you need to add the join action to the route with the appropriate HTTP verb:

map.resources :users, :member => { :join => :get }