RoutingTricks
=============

This is a collection of hacks and tricks that may or may not actually be
useful. It is intended more as a tool for exploring (and teaching) the
internals of Rails' routing implementation.


map.redirect
------------

This is a tool for specifying a redirect from one route to another. Any
request matching the route will emit a 302 response that redirects to the
target route. It requires that the target be a named route. Consider:

  ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
    map.resources :things
    map.redirect  "/", :things
  end

By default, the map.resources command does not map anything to the root URL,
"/". We can use map.redirect to easily cause requests for "/" to be redirected to the things url, "/things".

If a route has parameters, those will be passed to the destination route as well:

  ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
    map.resources :things
    map.redirect  "/:id", :thing
  end

In this case, a request for "/15" would be redirected to "/thing/15", automatically.


Recognition based on host/domain/subdomain
------------------------------------------

This allows you to specify the host, domain, or subdomain as a condition for
recogizing the request. For instance, you can have two identical paths that
route to different controllers and actions, depending on what the subdomain
is:

  ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
    map.connect "/", :controller => "admin", :conditions => { :subdomain => "admin" }
    map.connect "/", :controller => "public"
  end

Then, "admin.foo.com" would go to the admin controller, while "www.foo.com"
and "123.foo.com" will go to the public controller.

Similarly, you can specify :host and :domain in the conditions hash. The values can be either strings (for exact 
matches) or regular expressions (for more dynamic matching).