Clean up routes with_options

Say there are a couple static pages in an application, and we have a StaticController with a few methods specifically for rendering views, such as about or privacy.

# app/controllers/static_controller.rb
class StaticController < ApplicationController
  def about
    # render about.html.erb
  end

  def privacy
    # render privacy.html.erb
  end
end

map.resources :static wouldn't work, because it's not exactly a Rails resource (add, edit, update, new etc.). Also it would be nice to have them as top level directories (domain.com/about). So, the solution (one of them at least) would be to map.with_options!

Here's the code.

# config/routes.rb
ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.with_options :controller => "static" do |static|
    static.about "/about", :action => "about"
    static.privacy "/privacy", :action => "privacy"
  end
end

To break it down, by using with_options and :controller => "static" the code is simply adding :controller => "static" to each of the routes inside the block. It's the equivalent of:

map.about "/about", :controller => "static", :action => "about"
map.privacy "/privacy", :controller => "static", :action => "privacy"

Just another random snippet, hopefully it's useful to someone out there.

Posted on October 20th, 2008