In this module, we will refine the routes, or how the URLs in the application act, as well as create a static page that contains info about the Scriba application.

If you look at the http://localhost:3000 webpage (with your server running of course), what do you see? Instead of that file, let’s tell Rails to serve out our transcriptions#index view.

Stop your server (remember, any changes to files in the config directory require you to restart rails) and open config/routes.rb. Update the root path (root 'welcome#index')

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :transcriptions
  ...
  root 'transcriptions#index'
  ...
end

What happens now if you start your web server back up?

While we’re at it, this actually added a new path in rails for us to use—the root_path. We can use this in the application layout to return people to the defined root of the project. Open up app/views/layouts/application.html.erb and find the line

<%= link_to "Scriba", transcriptions_path, class: 'navbar-brand' %>

And update it to:

<%= link_to "Scriba", root_path, class: 'navbar-brand' %>

If you ever need to check the routes you have defined in your application, you can check them by running the bin/rake routes task.

Now when you restart the server, what happens when you click on the “Scriba” link? How is it different than when you click on “Transcriptions”?

A Static Page

Another common task you will find yourself needing to do is create content that is static (not saved to the database). We’ll use a rails generator to create a new controller and view for us but skip creating a model (and database migration).

$ bin/rails generate controller pages about
      create  app/controllers/pages_controller.rb
       route  get 'pages/about'
      invoke  erb
      create    app/views/pages
      create    app/views/pages/about.html.erb
      invoke  test_unit
      create    test/controllers/pages_controller_test.rb
      invoke  helper
      create    app/helpers/pages_helper.rb
      invoke    test_unit
      create      test/helpers/pages_helper_test.rb
      invoke  assets
      invoke    coffee
      create      app/assets/javascripts/pages.js.coffee
      invoke    scss
      create      app/assets/stylesheets/pages.css.scss

As you can see from the output, this generated views, tests, and helpers for us but no models. It also wrote to config/routes.rb a line to tell rails how to access the code. Now we can update the file.

Open app/views/pages/about.html.erb and add some lorem ipsum (in Atom, simply type the word “lorem” and hit the tab key) text in a <p> element.

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.</p>

Now if your server is still running, you can get to the new page at http://localhost:3000/pages/about.

Better Routes

When we ran the generator for the controller, one of the things it did for us was create a new entry in the config/routes.rb file. The entry get 'pages/about' tells rails what to do when a particular path is requested. Right now it’s a bit of an “ugly” URL since to get here you have to have the word “pages” in them. Let’s make this look a bit better by updating the config/routes.rb file so there is a path defined as /about.

Under the line get 'pages/about' in the config/routes.rb` file, add the line

get 'about', to: 'pages#about'

Restart your server, you should be able to see the same page at http://localhost:3000/about.

But we forgot the credits page…

No worries, we don’t even have to use the console. We’ll do this manually. To do this, we need to update the pages controller (to tell rails what to do), update the routes (to define what to do), and finally, the actual view with the information.

Let’s work with the controller first. We need to add a simple method that defines what to do. We don’t need to do anything, but we still need to define this. Simply add this code to app/controllers/pages_controller.

def credit
end

Now we can add the route. Open config/routes.rb and try create a route for pages#credit (think about it for a second).

Now we need to create a new view file. Create the file app/views/pages/credit.html.erb. In it, create some dummy credits.

<h1>Credits</h1>
<p>This application was created by me, for this thing I did.</p>
<p>Some other people helped too.</p>

Git

Now that everything is working, it’s time to add and commit everything to git. Go ahead and add the new files, and commit them all with a “good” message.

Summary

In this module, we created a static pages for our application that don’t necessarily need to be stored in a database. We used both the rails generator and did this manually. You also learned a bit more about how routes work and also how to create custom routes to make the URLs of your application easier to “guess” by users.