Rails Magic - Part 1

I have heard a lot about the magic in Rails without really experiencing it until today. In Django, url names are explicitly defined in the urls.py file, for instance stories-index is the url name for stories/:

url(r'stories/$', stories_view, name='stories-index')

In Rails, there is a built-in url helper which will automatically generate those route names, my routes.rb is:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.resources :stories
  map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
  map.connect ':controller/:action/:id.:format'
end

The route name to stories is stories_path, the module ActionController::Resources take care of that. Here's a sample usage of the stories route name, stories_path:

def create
  @story = Story.new(params[:story])
  @story.save
  redirect_to stories_path
end

You can check those route names with the following command at the CLI:

rake routes

You still have to suffix the displayed names with _url or _path. It's not a bad thing to see some automatic name generation but the rails developer will have to be aware of it.