This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Jeremy Voorhis. Original Post: Announcing resource_hacks Feed Title: JVoorhis Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jvoorhis Feed Description: JVoorhis is a Rubyist in northeast Ohio. He rambles about Ruby on Rails, development practices, other frameworks such as Django, and on other days he is just full of snark. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Jeremy Voorhis Latest Posts From JVoorhis

resource_hacks is a plugin that extends edge Rails’ new restful routes implementation. While the current opinion of the core team is that we should only use member resources with a numeric id, resource_hacks allows Rails to support arbitrary an arbitrary member path. Allow me to illustrate:

  map.resources :entries

gives us the member path /entries/1 where 1 is the value of params[:id]. With resource_hacks, you can still use a numeric id, but also declare an arbitrary member path like so:

map.resources :entries,
  :member_path => '/entries/:year/:month/:day/:permalink'

This gives us the member path /entries/2006/8/1/announcing_resource_hacks rather than /entries/1.

With this routing definition, you may send an HTTP request with the PUT method to update the Entry via EntriesController#update. The same goes for DELETE. The collection found at /entries will not be affected by resource_hacks.

You can install the plugin by running

  $ script/plugin install http://svn.planetargon.org/rails/plugins/resource_hacks

from your application’s base directory.

One final note: I cannot take full credit for this plugin. The basic implementation came from Andrew Grim, PLANET ARGON’s latest developer. Welcome, Andrew!