Ruby on Rails: Get the controller and action name based on a path

Question

I am trying to get the controller and action name based on a path. I have a route:

map.resources :permissions

I thought that I could use:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path "/permissions/1"

To get a hash like:

{ :controller => "permissions", :action => "show" }

The actual hash that comes back is:

{ :controller => "permissions", :action => "1" }

How do I get the correct action name instead of just my passed in ID? The dispatcher must be able to get at it somehow or Rails wouldn't work, but I am having trouble locating how it is accomplished.

Answer 1

This is what I ended up doing. It is ugly and there must be a better way, but it works for now. It happens in a before_filter so that I can see if the user has access to the controller / action they are attempting to access.

I chose to use route-based authorization as opposed to model-based authorization.

# Get method of current request
method = options[:method] ? options[:method] : 'get'

# Create a new request - hate this that is required
env = Rack::MockRequest.env_for(url, {:method => method})
request = ActionController::Request.new(env)

# For some reason, calling this fills in the controller / action information for the request
# just using recognize_path doesn't work correctly with resources...
ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize(request)

Then you access the controller and action with request.params[:controller] and request.params[:action].

All of this would not be necessary if ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path("/permissions/1") returned the correct action.

Answer 2

As of Rails 4 the method to recognize the path is now Rails.application.routes.recognize_path as opposed to ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path and it returns a hash of controller, action, and id like so:

Rails.application.routes.recognize_path(app.edit_somecontroller_path(1))
 => {:controller=>"somecontroller", :action=>"edit", :id=>"1"}

Answer 3

What are you really after? If you're really after the action name and controller name... you can just ask for

controller.controller_name

and

controller.action_name

Does that help, or do you really need to parse a string to do it?