What does article_path mean?

Question

I am quite new to programming and am working my way through the official Getting Started guide. This guides new RoR programmers through a practical Blog application involving CRUD articles that have many comments.

article_path is something that comes up quite often but I have no idea at all at what this does, what it means, how it is used etc.

Here are some examples of how the guide uses article_path:

<%= form_for :article, url: articles_path do |f| %>

(in app/views/articles/new.html.erb)

<%= link_to 'Back', articles_path %>

(also in app/views/articles/new.html.erb)

def destroy
 @article = Article.find(params[:id])
 @article.destroy

 redirect_to articles_path
end

(in app/controllers/articles_controller.rb)

class CommentsController < ApplicationController
 def create
  @article = Article.find(params[:article_id])
  @comment = @article.comments.create(comment_params)
  redirect_to article_path(@article)
 end

(in app/controllers/comments_controller.rb)

I would be very grateful for an explanation, as I like to fully understand what a specific line of code does.

Thank you for your time

Answer 1

articles_path will produce something like this http://yourserver.com/articles which will be associated with your ArticlesController and index action.

Consequently article_path(@article) will produce something like this http://yourserver.com/articles/1234567 which will be associated with your ArticlesController and show action and produce a page for an article with id 1234567.

You also can do rake routes on the command line and see all the details

Answer 2

The following in your routes.rb file:

match '/articles' => 'articles#index', :via => [:get], :as => :articles

Can be invoked my mentioning articles_path. In the above example any request given to domain.com/articles will be mapped to articles#index. Instead of making request to '/articles' you can just use 'articles_path'

Another Example:

match '/articles/all' => 'articles#getAll', :via => [:get], :as => :articles_complete

Any request to yourserver.com/articles/all will be mapped to articles controller and getAll Action. Instead of mentioning '/articles/all', you can just invoke 'articles_complete_path'. I'm naming articles_complete instead of articles_all to show the convention used.