Routing filters wrap around the complex beast that the Rails routing system is to allow for unseen flexibility and power in Rails URL recognition and generation.
As powerful and awesome the Rails' routes are, when you need to design your URLs in a manner that only slightly leaves the paved cowpaths of Rails conventions, you're usually unable to use all the goodness of helpers and convenience that Rails ships with.
This library comes with four more or less reusable filters and it is easy to implement custom ones. Maybe the most popular one is the Locale routing filter:
Locale
- prepends the page's :locale (e.g. /de/products)Pagination
- appends page/:num (e.g. /products/page/2)Uuid
- prepends a uuid for authentication or other purposes (e.g. /d00fbbd1-82b6-4c1a-a57d-098d529d6854/products/1)Extension
- appends an extension (e.g. /products.html)
routing-filter currently only works with Rails. It should not be all too hard to get it working with plain Rack::Mount but I haven't had that usecase, yet.
Just install the Gem:
$ gem install routing-filter
The Gem should work out of the box for Rails 3 after specifying it in your application's Gemfile.
# Gemfile
gem 'routing-filter'
In order to use it with Rails 2.x you could specify it in your environment.rb
# config/environment.rb
gem 'routing-filter'
Once the Gem has loaded you can setup the filters in your routes file like this:
# in config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
filter :pagination, :uuid
end
Filters can also accept options:
Rails.application.routes.draw do
filter :extension, :exclude => %r(^admin/)
end
For example implementations have a look at the existing filters in lib/routing_filter/filters
The following would be a sceleton of an empty filter:
module RoutingFilter
class Awesomeness < Filter
def around_recognize(path, env, &block)
# Alter the path here before it gets recognized.
# Make sure to yield (calls the next around filter if present and
# eventually `recognize_path` on the routeset):
yield.tap do |params|
# You can additionally modify the params here before they get passed
# to the controller.
end
end
def around_generate(params, &block)
# Alter arguments here before they are passed to `url_for`.
# Make sure to yield (calls the next around filter if present and
# eventually `url_for` on the controller):
yield.tap do |result|
# You can change the generated url_or_path here. Make sure to use
# one of the "in-place" modifying String methods though (like sub!
# and friends).
end
end
end
end
You can specify the filter explicitely in your routes.rb:
Rails.application.routes.draw do
filter :awesomeness
end
(I am not sure if it makes sense to provide more technical information than this because the usage of this plugin definitely requires some advanced knowledge about Rails internals and especially its routing system. So, I figure, anyone who could use this should also be able to read the code and figure out what it's doing much better then from any lengthy documentation.
If I'm mistaken on this please drop me an email with your suggestions.)
An early usecase from which this originated was the need to define a locale at the beginning of an URL in a way so that
- the locale can be omitted when it is the default locale
- all the url_helpers that are generated by named routes as well as url_for continue to work in a concise manner (i.e. without specifying all parameters again and again)
- ideally also plays nicely with default route helpers in tests/specs
You can read about this struggle and two possible, yet unsatisfying solutions here. The conclusion so far is that Rails itself does not provide the tools to solve this problem in a clean and dry way.
Another usecase that eventually spawned the implementation of this plugin was the need to map an arbitrary count of path segments to a certain model instance. In an application that I've been working on recently I needed to map URL paths to a nested tree of models like so:
root
+ docs
+ api
+ wiki
E.g. the docs section should map to the path /docs
, the api section to
the path /docs/api
and so on. Furthermore, after these paths there need to be
more things to be specified. E.g. the wiki needs to define a whole Rails
resource with URLs like /docs/wiki/pages/1/edit
.
The only way to solve this problem with Rails' routing toolkit is to map
a big, bold /*everything
catch-all ("globbing") route and process the whole
path in a custom dispatcher.
This, of course, is a really unsatisfying solution because one has to reimplement everything that Rails routes are here to help with: regarding both URL recognition (like parameter mappings, resources, ...) and generation (url_helpers).
This plugin offers a solution that takes exactly the opposite route.
Instead of trying to change things between the URL recognition and generation stages to achieve the desired result it wraps around the whole routing system and allows to pre- and post-filter both what goes into it (URL recognition) and what comes out of it (URL generation).
This way we can leave everything else completely untouched.
- We can tinker with the URLs that we receive from the server and feed URLs to Rails that perfectly match the best breed of Rails' conventions.
- Inside of the application we can use all the nice helper goodness and conveniences that rely on these conventions being followed.
- Finally we can accept URLs that have been generated by the url_helpers and, again, mutate them in the way that matches our requirements.
So, even though the plugin itself is a blatant monkey-patch to one of the most complex area of Rails internals, this solution seems to be effectively less intrusive and pricey than others are.
Authors: Sven Fuchs License: MIT