Rails: model_url for custom action

Question

Let's say I have the simple rails blog app.

And I have a custom action, like page_views which shows the number of views of the post.

class PostsController < ApplicationController

  def page_views
     #show some page views
  end

end

And there is also an associated view in the app/views/Posts folder.

Now, in the routes.rb I have:

map.resources :posts

map.resources :posts, :collection => {
                                      :page_views=> :get
                                      }

in my posts show.html.erb file I have a link to the page_views view:

link_to("View Page Views",page_views_posts_path + "/" + post.id.to_s)

Another paths:

page_views_posts_path(post)
page_views_path(post)
page_views_posts(post)

Have either resulted in method not found or an incorrect url, like:

http://localhost:3000/posts/page_views.#<posts:0xabcdef00>

I would assume the url should be:

http://localhost:3000/posts/page_views/1

So, what I am missing here?

Answer 1

If you want to provide page_views page for each view you should declare extra action not as collection method but as a member method:

map.resources :posts, :member => { :page_views=> :get }

Also if you want this for all posts as well (show the ranking table of some sorts) add the same parameter as collection action:

map.resources :posts, :member => { :page_views=> :get }, :collection => { :page_views => :get }

This way you'll have following routes generated:

page_views_post_path(post) # for single post
page_views_posts_path      # for all posts

You can check new routes by running following command:

$ rake routes | grep page_views

You will get only those associated views considering the fact that you haven't declared them for other controllers.