[edge Rails] shallow nesting of routes

Ok, finally. This is the first post of a series about some new exciting edge rails features. ;)

Here at Railslove most of our projects are living on the edge (thanks to braid!) ;) and we try to keep close track of what’s happening in the rails master branch.

Today I’ve found a commit that is actually a few days old but this will clean up a lot of my nested routes.

Imagine your application has a User who has_many :posts which again has_many :comments. Your routes would look something like:

map.resources :users do |user|
  user.resources :posts do |post|
    post.resources :comments
  end
end

This defines the following helpers and URLs

users_url #=> /users/
user_posts_url #=> /users/1/posts/
user_post_comments_url #=> /users/1/posts/10/comments

however only the full nested routes are available.
/posts/10 or /comments/10 are not available and you need to declare those seperately:

map.resources :posts do |post|
  post.resources :comments
end
map.resources :comments

This commit now allows you to add a :shallow => true option which does this automatically for you. This is great and shortens the routes.rb a lot.
The example above would then just look like:

map.resources :users, :shallow => true do |user|
  user.resources :posts, :shallow => true do |post|
    post.resources :comments
  end
end

and post_url, comment_url, post_comments_url,… get also defined.

very nice!

Have a look at the commit message and source code for more information.

Update:
Georg of SalesKing.eu fame pointed me to Ryan’s great post about the :shallow option.

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