DRY Rails Routes

Advance techniques to improve Rails Routing

There could be different ways of writing a block of code but the aim should always be to go for a precise and accurate one. Here in this section, we will be discussing about drying out the routes from Rails to make them more precise in two ways as given below,

• Use of concerns in Rails Routing
• Breaking down routes in different files

So let’s get started straight to the point below,

Use of concerns in Rails Routing

This is one of the very common ways to write down common routes in concern and use it in different places. So let’s create a scenario in which we have to write some routes as below,

resources :clients do
 get :followers_list, on: :member
 get :common_list, on: :collection
end
resources :agents do
 get :followers_list, on: :member
 get :common_list, on: :collection
end

So, we can reduce the code repetition here using the concern below,

concern :listable do
  get :followers_list, on: :member
  get :common_list, on: :collection
end
resources :clients, concerns: :listable
resources :agents, concerns: :listable

And it will give out the same output but this small change will make the code more precise and easy to understand.

Breaking down routes in different files

This may also be a widespread way of using routes for let’s say separation of API-based routes and Web-based routes. So let’s again create a scenario where we have some API-based routes and Web-based routes as below,

# web based routes
resources :users
resources :dashboard, only: :index
# api based routes
namespace :api_panel, path: 'api', defaults: { format: :json } do 
  namespace :v1 do
   resources :users
  end
end

Since there could be a lot of routes in both of them, we can separate them into multiple files as below,

class ActionDispatch::Routing::Mapper
  def draw routes_name
    instance_eval(File.read(Rails.root.join("config/routes/#{ routes_name }.rb")))
  end
end
Rails.application.routes.draw do  
  # Web based Routes
  draw :web_based
  # API based Routes
  draw :api_based
end

So now we can create two different files as config/routes/web_based.rb and config/routes/api_based.rb to differentiate these routes. Now the fun part to it is we can make concerns to use of common routes by defining draw :concern before defining Web and API routes and then creating all common routes to the config/routes/concern.rb , isn’t it amazing? It sure is for me!

Being said so I’ll keep the rest of the experimenting on the reader. See you in the next blog with some new interesting topics.