Ruby on Rails Route Helpers vs Paths

While learning how to write tests for requests, I came across a different way of writing links in Rails. Up until this discovery I’ve used URL helpers as such:

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<%= link_to 'Add Account', new_account_path %>

By checking the application’s routes, we can see URL helpers (1st column) and URI Patterns (3rd column).

$ rails routes -c accounts

      Prefix Verb   URI Pattern                  Controller#Action
    accounts GET    /accounts(.:format)          accounts#index
             POST   /accounts(.:format)          accounts#create
 new_account GET    /accounts/new(.:format)      accounts#new
edit_account GET    /accounts/:id/edit(.:format) accounts#edit
     account GET    /accounts/:id(.:format)      accounts#show
             PATCH  /accounts/:id(.:format)      accounts#update
             PUT    /accounts/:id(.:format)      accounts#update
             DELETE /accounts/:id(.:format)      accounts#destroy

URL helpers are mapped URI patterns, but we can also use these endpoints directly. In this case, the new_account URL helper is the same as /accounts/new. So the previous link can be changed to:

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<%= link_to 'Add Account', '/accounts/new' %>

If a link requires an ID, we can add it through string interpolation. So the following link…

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<%= link_to account.name, account_path(@account) %>

…can be rewritten like this:

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<%= link_to account.name, "/accounts/#{@account.id}" %>

This also applies to nested routes. Lets say we have the following in routes.rb:

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resources :accounts do
  resources :statements, only: %i[new create edit update]
end

This block generates the following routes for the statement model:

$ rails routes -c statements

                Prefix Verb  URI Pattern                                         Controller#Action
    account_statements POST  /accounts/:account_id/statements(.:format)          statements#create
 new_account_statement GET   /accounts/:account_id/statements/new(.:format)      statements#new
edit_account_statement GET   /accounts/:account_id/statements/:id/edit(.:format) statements#edit
     account_statement PATCH /accounts/:account_id/statements/:id(.:format)      statements#update
                       PUT   /accounts/:account_id/statements/:id(.:format)      statements#update

If we want to create a link to edit a statement using a URL helper, we would write the following. (Notice we need to pass in two different IDs):

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<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_account_statement_path(account_id: @account.id, id: @statement.id) %>

We can rewrite the link using a URI pattern instead.

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<%= link_to 'Edit', "/accounts/#{@account.id}/statements/#{@statement.id}/edit" %>

Both URL helpers and URI patterns get the job done, but I enjoyed using URI patterns for familiarity. If an external application is going to communicate with a Rails API, they’ll use the same endpoints defined in URI patterns. It keeps things a bit more consistent.