Ruby on Rails

Often a resource is little more than a container for a nested collection. The tendency of applications lately is to use "pretty urls" to enhance the readability of a resource's URL. Additionally, it is quite common when performing search engine optimization to try to eliminate as many folders in the url path as possible. In such situations, it makes sense to collapse the primary path to a nested resource.

For example, consider a website with a local product where they list businesses by category, subcategory, state, city, and finally business name. The default url using nested routes would be:

/local/categories/restaurants/subcategories/korean/states/california/cities/mountain-view/totoro-tofu-house

However, all the types here can be assumed as long as the developer takes care to prevent the use of reserved names like "new" and "edit" resulting in a very pleasant and readable url like so:

/local/restaurants/korean/california/mountain-view/totoro-tofu-house

Having been faced with such requirements a number of times now, I became irritated that I couldn't use nested routes so I dug around in the resources code and found it not that hard to extend.

The result is a plugin for people to try this functionality located at:

http://github.com/caring/default...

And a patch to rails at:

http://github.com/chriseppstein/...

as well as attached.

This provides the ability for a resources declaration to declare itself as :default => true, thereby omitting the leading scope identifier. It also provides a :show => :foos that will delegate the show action of a nested resource to the index action of the FoosController by generating the show route with a lower routing priority than the nested index.