One of the things about rails that I find really well designed is the routing (mapping of url’s to controller and actions). However I have noticed a little problem, by default it assumes that the routes cannot have full stops in them, which is a bit of a pain with floating point numbers or files with extensions in them.
I want
location/-15.0/-45.0
To map to controller x and action y with two arguments latitude and longitude
I added the route below and found that it’d construct the link but not recognise it
map.connect "location/:lat/:lon",:controller=>"x",:action=>"y"
After a few quick tries I found it was due to the full stop and the easiest method I’ve seen is to add conditions to the routes and set it to
map.connect "location/:lat/:lon",:controller=>"x",:action=>"y",:requirements => {:lat => /\-?[0-9]*\.[0-9]*/,:lon => /\-?[0-9]*\.[0-9]*/
Generally speaking the routing mechanism is really good, allowing simple validation using regex’s to easily screen out dodgy requests.
