Rails 3 resource routes with dots; or, how to make a Ruby developer go a little bit insane

This one cost me at least an hour of frustration.

So apparently the Rails router has considered the dot (“.”) to be a “separator” character along with the slash (“/”) since version 1.2. I don’t know in what context this ever seemed like a good idea, but whatever. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to bite you every day, but when it does it will be in very weird ways. To wit:

First, a simple routes.rb.

  resources :users do
    resources :projects
  end

Fill in some typical values, and you get a path:

irb(main):009:0> app.user_projects_path("avdi")
=> "/users/avdi/projects"

Now fill in a value with a period in it, and watch it explode:

irb(main):010:0> app.user_projects_path("avdi.grimm")
ActionController::RoutingError: No route matches {
  :user_id=>"avdi.grimm", :action=>"create", :controller=>"projects"
}

:action => "create"? What?!! Who said anything about create?!

As it turns out, there is an invocation in your routes file which will fix this:

  resources :users, :constraints => { :id => /.*/ } do
    resources :projects
  end


irb(main):013:0> app.user_projects_path("avdi.grimm")
=> "/users/avdi.grimm/projects"

Now I know what you’re thinking. “That’s so obvious, why didn’t he think of that immediately?” What can I say, some days I’m slow.

UPDATE: Here’s the Rails 2.* version:

  resources :users, :requirements => { :id => /.*/ } do
    resources :projects
  end


And here's a version that accepts anything BUT slashes for the parameter value:

  resources :users, :requirements => { :id => /[^/]+/ } do
    resources :projects
  end

http://www.hellovenado.com lorenjohnson

I guess the “.” became all about response_for and response formats. I find Rails routing awkward often, though like the arch of your conundrum above, I can usually get the routing the way I want it after a brief visit or two to Hades on the way.
http://www.hellovenado.com lorenjohnson

I guess the “.” became all about response_for and response formats. I find Rails routing awkward often, though like the arch of your conundrum above, I can usually get the routing the way I want it after a brief visit or two to Hades on the way.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Chris-Williams/563737213 Chris Williams

THANK YOU! I'm glad I found this post quickly, I was prepared to beat my head against this for quite a while.
dwradcliffe

Thank you so much! Exactly what I needed.
chel

thanks! for many resourses we can do something like:

[:users, ::posts, ::comments].each { |r| resources r, :constraints => { :id => /.*/ } }
djberg96

By allowing /.*/ you bust your regular respond_to blocks though, don’t you? I mean if “foo” is a valid userid and the url is “foo.xml”, it’s going to try to find a “foo.xml” user instead of rendering xml for the foo user.

Is there a catch-all respond_to we can use instead?
Freakent

Thanks for sharing this. I learned not one, but two things from your post!.
http://twitter.com/benevolentcode George Anderson

Not particularly germane to the subject at hand, but in Rails 3.1.x (3.0.x?) you can tighten up your route constraint:

resources :users, :constraints => { :id => /.*/ } do

like so:

resources :users, :id => /.*/ do
- http://avdi.org Avdi Grimm
  
  AWESOME! And completely germaine. Thanks!