how to set up and use a Rails routes prefix

Question

When running rake routes I see:

 Prefix   Verb   URI Pattern                                       Controller#Action  articles  GET    /articles(.:format)                               articles#index  new_article GET    /articles/new(.:format)                           articles#new 

along with some others I left out.

This is because my routes.rb file has:

resources :articles 

My question is what exactly is this Prefix, and how would I change it?

From my understanding it is a shortcut to the URI, so in my app I could just refer to new_article instead of articles/new? Do I really refer to @new_article or is there some other format to reference it.

Second question, how do I edit that? Lets say I want a prefix called new_document instead of new_article for the get request on that url. What would I put in my routes.rb file?

I looked at this link from the rails guides but all it seems to show is how to make the url longer by adding a prefix in front of it.

Answer 1

Paths

I'm not sure why it's called prefix - it should be called path helper:

The bottom line is when you call helpers like link_to or form_tag etc - they will require paths to populate different actions in your app's routing structure.

As Rails favours convention over configuration & DRY programming, meaning if you can reference these path helpers over using standard urls, it will allow you to make one reference & chance the route as required

EG

Calling articles_path is far more powerful than referencing /articles every time

---

Routes

To answer your question properly, you will need to appreciate Rails uses resourceful routing - basically meaning that every route helper you create should be defined around any resource in your application

Due to the MVC structure of Rails, these resources will typically be defined by the controllers you use:

#config/routes.rb resources :articles #-> articles_path etc 

You should always reference your resources as they are (in your case articles).

To customize the path helper, you'll need to change the reference in the routes file, like this:

#config/routes.rb resources :articles, as: :document, path: "document" #-> domain.com/documents 

This allows you to define custom routes / path helpers, allowing you to call those as you wish

Answer 2

It let's you use shortcuts such as new_article_path or new_article_url in your controllers and views. These come in very handy when doing things like redirecting users to a specific page or generating dynamic links.

You can change the prefix by adding the as: option in your routes.rb file. For example:

GET '/new', to: 'articles#new', as: 'my_new_article` 

This would change the prefix to my_new_article.