Well the title Question pretty much sums it up, But I'd like to detail a scenario anyways,

I've created a DemoController, (I have not created a Resource model), and my routes.rb looks like this:

DispatchMe::Application.routes.draw do
  root to: "demo#index"
end

From the demo controller I'm dong the following:

class DemoController < ApplicationController
  def index
    redirect_to :action => 'show'
  end

  def show
  end
end

There is a file in: app/views/demo/show.html.erb of course, And I'd expected that template to be rendered but instead I'm getting the following error:

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/assets")

and this URL is generated as a result from the redirect:

/assets?action=show&controller=demo

Am I missing something here? I thought rails was supposed to render the action's template for such cases.

Note. I understand that If I create a route like get 'show' => "demo#show" and call redirect_to show_path it'll work just fine, But I need to know if that's mandatory?

Thank you very much!

• ruby-on-rails-3

For the desired behavior, use render instead of redirect_to:

class PagesController < ApplicationController
  def index
    render :action => "show"
  end

  def show
  end
end

EDIT:

You can use redirect_to on other actions, but from what I can tell, the index action sets the base path. To simplify route definition, use resources :controller_name. You can view the routes generated by resources by typing rake routes in your command line.

Example:

demo_controller.rb

class DemoController < ApplicationController
  def index
  end

  def show
    redirect_to :action => 'index'
  end
end

routes.rb

DispatchMe::Application.routes.draw do
  root to: "demo#index"
  resources :demo
end

development.log

Started GET "/demo/show" for 127.0.0.1 at 2012-04-04 14:55:25 -0400
Processing by DemoController#show as HTML
  Parameters: {"id"=>"show"}
Redirected to http://dispatch.dev/
Completed 302 Found in 0ms (ActiveRecord: 0.0ms)