3.8. RESTful Route Customizations

Rails’s RESTful routes give you a pretty nice package of named routes, mapped to useful, common, controller actions—the CRUD superset you’ve already learned about. Sometimes, however, you want to customize things a little more, while still taking advantage of the RESTful route naming conventions and the multiplication table approach to mixing named routes and HTTP request methods.

The techniques for doing this are useful when, for example, you’ve got more than one way of viewing a resource that might be described as showing. You can’t (or shouldn’t) use the show action itself for more than one such view. Instead, you need to think in terms of different perspectives on a resource, and create URLs for each one.