Conditionally map a single route to different controllers

Sometimes it’s useful to have the same route conditionally map to different controllers. To illustrate this, imagine we have a blog with categories and posts, each of which have a similar URL, /some-category for categories and /some-post for posts. Our routes.rb file looks something like this:

get ':slug', to: 'categories#show'
get ':slug', to: 'posts#show'

So how do we know to which controller a request has to go? The routes would be identical, but only one can match, and doing a redirect from one controller to the other seems very dirty and not the Rails way.

Fortunately, Rails offers a mechanism to solve this problem, we can use constraint classes for these routes, which can determine if a request matches a route. Such a constraint class looks like this:

class CategoryConstraint
  def matches?
    Category.where(slug: request.path_parameters[:slug]).exists?
  end
end

If matches? returns true, then the request matches the route it’s attached to. Otherwise, the next route is being matched against. This constraint class checks if there’s a Category for a slug.

Now place this class in lib/category_constraint.rb. Don’t forget to restart the server to make sure the class is loaded. Next, we have to add the constraint in our routes:

get ':slug', to: 'categories#show', constraints: CategoryConstraint.new
get ':slug', to: 'posts#show'

Now the category route only matches if a Category with the requested slug actually exists, otherwise it matches against the posts route.

You could add another constraint to the posts route, and let it match against another route if neither a category nor post exists. Or you could have it eventually display a 404 page or do a redirect.