with ruby on rails, it’s so easy to build stuff fast; heck it’s the nature of being Agile.

script/generate controller [name] [model]
p. …create a controller

script/generate model [name]
p. …create data model

script/generate scaffold [model] [controller]
p. … create ruby scaffold /add/edit/view/list/ using a specific model

script/generate migration add_stuff
p. …create new migration script

rake db:migrate
p. …apply any pending migrations to your database

One of the key factors in developing a web app is to determine it’s site structure and how each section permeates to another.

Routes

When your user navigates to your web address, which controller/view is he going to see?. This is managed by Rails Routes which is an efficient upgrade from mod_rewrite rules in PHP.

to start…

go into your rails webapps root directory and open routes.rb in /config. this controls how the user perceives the webs look.

so scroll down till you see…
bq. map.connect ‘:controller/:action/:id.:format’
map.connect ‘:controller/:action/:id’

and above this you can add…
bq. map.connect ‘’, :controller => ’account’, :action => ‘signup’

make sure you rename or delete the index.html file in /public otherwise this won’t work.

now everytime someone goes to www.yours.com/ it’ll navigate them to the signup action of the account controller. this is rather than having www.yours.com/account/signup in the browser’s address bar.

of course, when they navigate away it’ll change to /account/list or whatever actions you’ve setup but at least now you can catch out users from jumping to the root and getting errors or redirecting them to the path manually.

note: the routes operate on precedence, so the one first will knock out the second, etc.

Sharing Controllers

when writing your app you may want to redirect an action in one view to an action in another view. e.g. click on the ‘posts’ link to view your ‘posts’; while your in the ‘accounts’ view/controller.

so to do this, add this inside your method for jumping to your posts

redirect_to :controller => ‘posts’, :action => ‘index’

find more at rails api