Overriding a resource route to / (root) in Rails3: not changing the path helper?

Question

Hi,

I am quite new to Rails3, I basically created a subscribers scaffolding, I only want my app to respond to new and create actions.

So in config/routes.rb I defined:

resources :subscribers, :only => [:new, :create]

Which works this way

GET /subscribers => subscribers#new
POST /subscribers => subscribers#create

Now I want my app to exhibit the subscribers resources at / (root) instead of /subscribers, so here is what I did:

match '/' => "subscribers#new"
match '/' => "subscribers#create"
match '/' => "subscribers#thankyou"
resources :subscribers, :only => [:new, :create]

Which somehow works, but is probably not the DRYest thing: here are the issues I have:

1. When going back to the form after an issue on a create the browser displays the /subscribers URL instead of just /, the form is created using the form_for(@subscriber) helper method, so the path helper must be somehow unaffected by the route
2. Ideally I don't even want the app to respond to a request on /subscribers
3. I noticed a weird bug, when posting the form while disconnected (from /, and then doing a refresh when the connection comes back (browser ask for resubmitting => OK), the Rails app crashes (I don't have the error stack though as this was on production), why is that?

Also, I tried setting up the route this way:

resources :subscribers, :only => [:new, :create] do
  collection do
    post '/' => :create
    get '/' => :new
  end
end

Which is probably DRYer, but it doesn't fix any of these issues.

I am sure this is something quite simple, please help!

Answer 1

For number 2 in your list, delete this line, and rewrite any _path or _url methods in your erb:

resources :subscribers, :only => [:new, :create]

Answer 2

You could do

resources :subscribers, :path => ''

and make sure that GET / is being served by your root template, e.g. by adding this to SubscribersController:

  def index
    render 'welcome/index'
  end

I experimented with using a match "/" declaration to override the resource index action and map it to another controller instead but apparently a resources declaration is always fully overriding manually declared routes.