Override Orchid Routes in Apps

[jduss4]

Right now I don't know how to override or alter routes that were drawn by the orchid engine. I haven't read too much about it, yet, but spitballing ideas

• copy / inject routes into app routes.rb so easily edited there
• figure out some fancy way of manipulating the routes creation (prepend? append?)
• put it under the orchid namespace and then see if it gets called correctly based on location?

http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html#routes

[techgique]

From Jess: "... you can't override a named route. Like item_path is going to always go to items#show at /items/:id because we can't override it to be /:id or whatever the WCA needs"

[jduss4]

This thread is for rails 3, but might have something we can try out: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5997527/overriding-named-routes-provided-by-rails-3-engines

[jduss4]

Okay, it looks like the app's routes load before the generator's routes load. This means that any gnarly code can be done on the engine's side and most casual users won't need to know about it.

There is likely a better way to do this, but I'm thinking...what if we run each of orchid's routes through a check. If there isn't currently a route with that name, we add it. If there is, we skip the orchid version (maybe outputting a warning about it being overridden?).

[jduss4]

So, using the above idea about only loading orchid routes if no similarly named app route, I mocked up a branch:

https://github.com/CDRH/orchid/commit/47acaaf6a7c05265e95cec57c777314dc9cd2ed4

This does appear to work in general cases. The bad news is that Cather specifically wants the letters at /letters/let0183 which currently means the root of the rails app. This means that if we add the route get /:id, it's going to match on EVERYTHING. We ideally need it to be loaded last. My mockup branch wouldn't address that. I think we could probably use "match" instead of "get" to make sure that only urls matching letter ids would be caught in that first overridden rule in the app routes?

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#advanced-constraints

[jduss4]

I believe that this now addresses the above concern, also. My questions now are:

• is there a better way to accomplish this?
• does it make sense to us the developers?

https://github.com/CDRH/orchid/tree/route_test

[techgique]

Code is reviewed and ready, but Jess said she'll move documentation to README.

We had discussed it before and I can't remember if we came to any conclusion. Do we want to add further constraints on the :id value? I recall not thinking it a good idea because one can't add anchors, but I read that all the constraints are anchored to the beginning of the string (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#segment-constraints) so that's no longer a reason to dismiss them. I think we were just hoping to avoid all the unnecessary API calls and return 404s for bad IDs. Are there any or only a handfull of non-#### documents for it to retrieve?

[jduss4]

I think I would prefer that the item path's id stays fairly open in orchid, but we could lock it down by app / project as needed?

[techgique]

Excellent point. I agree.

[jduss4]

Can this issue be closed?

[techgique]

After I add documentation to the PR and we merge it :)

[jduss4]

Oh! I thought all the routes stuff had already been merged, my bad

[techgique]

Oh, sorry I misread which issue this was when I posted that. There is the routing with Passenger deployment bug I'm working on now though, so that's a reason to leave it open. Will close this once that's sorted out.

[techgique]

Orchid routes don't work when the main app is deployed via Phusion Passenger because of how it spawns processes. It must be set to the 'direct' SpawnMethod for the routes to be present in the app. This can only be set vhost-wide and we don't want to do that for all future Orchid-based Rails apps. Looking into how to modify the code to be compatible.