You are in a maze of little, twisty evals, all similar. 2
Rails routing is making my head hurt. It’s starting to remind me of the guts of perl’s regular expression engine, which was said to be understood by three people, plus or minus five.
I just want to write routes like /articles/:art[year]/:art[month]/:art[mday]/:art[slug].
I’m seriously considering starting again from scratch, which can’t be right.
From what I know, validation and routing are two parts of Rails the core team acknowledge are a huge mess and need to be re-done. I’ve seen the guts of both and don’t much like either, but they’re so messy I wouldn’t really know where to start. And I don’t know what the core team’s priorities are.
I think I’m going to play with writing a parser (probably rparsec) that can parse a ‘resourcy’ URL and produce the controller/action/parameters triple. Once I know what my ‘target’ parser looks like I can write something that takes a routing.rb file and uses that to build the parser. And once I’ve done that, I need to run the parser in reverse to make url_for and friends work.
Doddle. Hah.