DEV Community: mpuchyr

Rails - Getting the Current URI

mpuchyr — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 18:23:49 +0000

As I was attempting to figure out a way to conditionally render a page that required information from the uri, one idea that I had required a way to retrieve the entire url.

After doing some searching, I found the following:

current_uri = request.env['PATH_INFO']

This acquires the entire current path in the address bar.

While I did not end up using the solution using the path and instead used params, I felt that this might be good information to have should I ever require the full path.

Order of Routes in Rails

mpuchyr — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 17:02:03 +0000

While adding features to a class project, I was struggling with an error that took me some time to debug. This post is meant as a reminder to myself (and possibly others) that ROUTE ORDER IN RAILS MATTERS.

Originally, I had the following code:

  get("/movies", { :controller => "movies", :action => "index"})
  get("/movies/:id", { :controller => "movies", :action => "movie"})
  get("/delete_movie/:id", { :controller => "movies", :action => "delete"})
  get("/movies/new", {:controller => "movies", :action => "new_movie"})

The problem that I had initially overlooked was that since Rails compiles the code from top to bottom, it was sending me to the "/movies/:id" when I was trying to use the "/movies/new" path, thinking that "new" was the movie's id. In the program, it was trying to look up a movie with the id of "new", which it would never find, and ended up giving me an error.

Eventually, after multiple changes and continually hitting the error, I finally realized the problem was the route order. Rearranging the routes in the following way, everything worked:

  get("/movies", { :controller => "movies", :action => "index"})
  get("/movies/new", {:controller => "movies", :action => "new_movie"})
  get("/movies/:id", { :controller => "movies", :action => "movie"})
  get("/delete_movie/:id", { :controller => "movies", :action => "delete"})

Keyword Parameters

mpuchyr — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 20:46:06 +0000

Named parameters specifying values within a method.

Method with regular parameters:
do_something(a, b)

Method with named parameters:
do_something(first_thing:, second_thing:)

In the example with the keyword parameters, the user has a clearer idea of what the arguments sent to the method are used for.