Intro to Rails Routing Warm-Up Questions

intro_to_rails_routing_warmup_questions.markdown

1. What is the purpose of the router in a Rails project?

• The router is used to take the incoming verb & path and find the corresponding controller action to run.

2. What routes would be provided to you with the line resources :items?

• All seven of the restful routes related to items, which would be:
  1. GET '/items'
  2. GET '/items/:id'
  3. GET '/items/new'
  4. POST '/items'
  5. GET '/items/:id/edit'
  6. PUT '/items/:id'
  7. DELETE '/items/:id'

3. What does root :to => "items#index" represent? How would you access that route in a web app?

• When someone goes to the root ('/') of your application, your items controller should load its index view.

4. What rake task is useful when looking at routes, and what information does it give you?

• rake routes will give you all of the routes for your application
• It will give you the automatically created helper name for your route along with the verb, the actual route, and the controller action

5. How would you interpret this output: items GET /items(.:format) items#index

• the name of the route is items
• the verb/path combo is GET /items
• (.:format) means that a file extension can be specified at the end of the route (but isn't required)
• the action index from the items controller will be run when someone visits this route

6. What is one major similiarity between Rails routing + controllers and the Sinatra projects we've been building?

• They use all the same RESTful routes to define how an application behaves

7. What is one major difference between Rails routing + controllers and the Sinatra projects we've been building?

• We no longer have to write out every single route we want to use!