Restricting routes to nested resources in Rails

Question

I am trying to create nested resources where the sub-resource doesn't have an existence of its own. e.g., an Address resource which is linked to a Person.

My route declaration looks like so:

map.resources :persons,
:has_many => :addresses

This gives me the following routes:

             person_addresses GET    /persons/:person_id/addresses                  {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"index"}
   formatted_person_addresses GET    /persons/:person_id/addresses.:format          {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"index"}
                              POST   /persons/:person_id/addresses                  {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"create"}
                              POST   /persons/:person_id/addresses.:format          {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"create"}
           new_person_address GET    /persons/:person_id/addresses/new              {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"new"}
 formatted_new_person_address GET    /persons/:person_id/addresses/new.:format      {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"new"}
          edit_person_address GET    /persons/:person_id/addresses/:id/edit         {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"edit"}
formatted_edit_person_address GET    /persons/:person_id/addresses/:id/edit.:format {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"edit"}
               person_address GET    /persons/:person_id/addresses/:id              {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"show"}
     formatted_person_address GET    /persons/:person_id/addresses/:id.:format      {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"show"}
                              PUT    /persons/:person_id/addresses/:id              {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"update"}
                              PUT    /persons/:person_id/addresses/:id.:format      {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"update"}
                              DELETE /persons/:person_id/addresses/:id              {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"destroy"}
                              DELETE /persons/:person_id/addresses/:id.:format      {:controller=>"addresses", :action=>"destroy"}

Now I want to make sure that a person's addresses are read-only, i.e., I only want the show and index actions for an address.

I tried this:

  map.resources :persons,
  :has_many => :addresses,
  :collection => { :addresses => [ :show, :index ] }

and got this error:

(in /home/rmk/app)
rake aborted!
Invalid HTTP method specified in route conditions: {:method=>:show}

(See full trace by running task with --trace)

Is there any way I can achieve this?

EDIT: My main problem was that I was not using the code block properly (I wanted to use has_one etc. as much as possible). So my persons routes look like this (somewhat contrived example):

map.resources :persons, :has_one => :ssn, :except => [:new, :edit] do |person|
 person.resources :addresses, :only => [:index, :show]
end

Answer 1

Is this what you're trying to do?

map.resources :persons do |person|
  person.resources :addresses, :only => [:index, :show]
end

This creates addresses as a nested resource of persons, but only makes the index and show views available.