Last night while working on chapter 12 for Rails 3 in Action I stumbled across an interesting problem detailed in this gist. The problem I was seeing is that the edit_admin_user_path route was not failing, while the admin_user_permissions_path path was failing.

I had my suspicions to why the first link worked and spent the remainder of last night digging through my favourite bit of Rails and Rails related source(ry): Action Dispatch and rack-mount. I didn’t figure it all completely out until after a good night’s sleep. It wasn’t until I saw pixeltrix’s comment on the Gist this morning that it all clicked.

I knew from a while ago that sometimes Rails will just know what to put as the :id part of a route and I never did bother questioning how that part of Rails works until last night. It turns out that Action Dispatch (and by extension, rack-mount) are very intelligent in the way that they build routes. Take the edit_admin_user_path route for example. This requires two parameters: :account_id and :id, representing an account and user object respectively. The routing code doesn’t care what arguments are passed in here, only the order of them. All it does is call to_param on the objects to extract the segments for the routes. So when you do this:

   edit_admin_user_path(@user)

But the order of the parameters in the URL are :account_id and then :id, Rails will assume that the first object is meant for the :account_id parameter. How does it work out the :id parameter then? It’s not passed into the helper, so instead it’s gathered from the current request’s parameters. Therefore, this helper generates a URL such as /2/users/2/edit inadvertently. We can change this to be simply:

   edit_admin_user_path

Then Rails will assume that we want the current :account_id and :id from the current request, making our code much shorter, compared to what we’d have to do if this feature didn’t exist:

  edit_admin_user_path(@account, @user)

The admin_user_permissions_path(@user) helper throws an error because it expects to receive both a :account_id and :user_id parameter. Without the :user_id parameter available or passed in to the helper, rack-mount won’t know how to generate this URL and will raise a “No route matches” error.

Oh, and I also offered a free copy of Rails 3 in Action to the person who helped me solve this issue, but it was really a team effort. alindeman, pixeltrix and pacsoe all get free, signed dead-tree copies when the book’s done. Thanks lads.