---
title: no thanks
teaser:
tags: web,rails
author: Jared Carroll
published_on: 2008-01-21
---

So I'm learning the latest Rails release by converting an existing app to it.
This app used namespaced controllers for its admin section.

New routes features have really cleaned this up.

Before

```ruby
map.resources :users,
  :controller => 'admin/users',
  :name_prefix => 'admin_',
  :path_prefix => 'admin'
```

After

```ruby
map.namespace(:admin) do |admin|
  admin.resources :users
end
```

Much cleaner.

Then I began to take advantage of Rails 2.0's smarter `#form_for` courtesy of
simple\_helpful in the non-admin portion of the app.

```erb
<% form_for @user do |form| %>

<% end %>
```

If that `user` object is a `#new_record?` that `#form_for` is going to generate
the following html:

```html
<form action="/users" method="post" class="new_user" id="new_user">

</form>
```

If that `user` object is **not** a `#new_record?` that `#form_for` is going to
generate the following html (assuming its id is 1):

```html
<form action="/users/1" method="post" class="edit_user" id="edit_user_1">
  <div style="margin:0;padding:0">
    <input name="_method" type="hidden" value="put" />
  </div>
</form>
```

Now let's look at the #new and #edit forms for the admin section of the site.

```erb
<% form_for [:admin, @user] do |form| %>

<% end %>
```

This will generate the same html as above except with '/admin' being prefixed
onto each `action` attribute value.

```ruby
[:admin, @user]
```

Ooo that is ugly.

Some more examples.

```ruby
redirect_to [:admin, @user]     # redirect_to admin_user_url

link_to 'show', [:admin, @user] # link_to 'show', admin_user_url
```

This anonymous `Array` syntax seems like such a quick hack, like they forgot
about namespaced controllers.  With all the nice interfaces in Rails, this one
really sticks out.  I'm willing to bet this becomes deprecated in the near
future.

In the meantime I'm going to stick with the much better looking old style.

```erb
<% form_for @user, :url => admin_user_url do |form| %>
<% end %>
```

However, this sucks because I'd really like to take advantage of these smarter
`#form_for`, `#redirect_to` and `#link_to` versions but I consider consistency
in my code more important.  I'd rather see 1 consistent way of using named
routes instead of using them solely in the namespaced controller sections of an
app in order to avoid this new ugly syntax.

This would probably be a lot cleaner in PHP.