Intro to Rails Routing Warm-Up Questions

intro_to_rails_routing_warmup_questions.markdown

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

• The router looks at the HTTP verb and URL, and matches it with the right controller action. It also saves any parameters that came with the request in a hash called params. You can type rake routes to view all routes available.

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

• All seven "RESTful" routes: index, show, new, create, edit, update, destroy

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

• This tells Rails to use the items controller and to go that root/index
• You would access this route in a web app by going to get "/items"

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

• rake routes allows you to view all the routes in a controller file
• It will look like this: edit_post GET /posts/:id/edit(.:format) posts#edit
• From left to right this tells you the name of the route, the HTTP verb, the URL, and the controller action this maps to

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

• The name of the route is the items root, it takes a GET request, the URL is /items, and the controller action this maps to is items#index

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

• They have the same core functionality - they both use controllers which interpret HTTP verbs and URLS to hit correct routes

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

• In Sinatra you have to manually type out all the routes, whereas it's all packaged into Rails in one line.
• Rails has multiple controllers, while Sinatra has one
• Rails also has helper methods