Dec 20, 2007
Rails General, Rails Plugins, Rails Techniques

Nested URL Parameters

One of the great things about Rails is the ability to wire together form logic with extreme ease through Rails' support of essentially representing hashes through the "object[name]" syntax of URL parameters. Arrays are also supported in a similar manner, making things like many-to-many relationship management cake.

In Rails 1.2 one issue I ran into is that this hash-based access logic cannot be nested when using helpers such as url_for (which is in turned used by helpers such as link_to, etc.) This type of functionality is rather useful when you are trying to encapsulate a set of name-value pairs within one "thing", such as a "search" which is many criteria => value pairs. For a particularly project of mine I established a pretty nice design pattern for working with searches and results in a very abstract manner, an area of Rails that I generally find underdeveloped with no standard practice.

I was lucky to stumble on a Rails plugin that monkey-patches Rails to support this: nested_params_patch. Information about this plugin is quite sparse but this article does a good job of better-explaining what the plugin does. Essentially it allows you to do things like this:

person_url(:name => {0 => 'Ryan', 1 => 'Kinderman})
                

Pretty cool stuff! I am always amazed and the kind of plugins and extensions that are possible, all resulting from Ruby's dynamicism and Rails' heavily extensible architecture.

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