Welcome/home page in Ruby on Rails - best practice

There doesn't seem to be a single best practice.

(1) The standard config/routes.rb file seems to suggest that the root page (or home/welcome page) should be handled by welcome#index. If you were to be guided by that, then to generate the corresponding welcome#index controller/action, you can use the following command:

rails generate controller Welcome index

Then, in config/routes.rb, you can remove the GET route (get "welcome/index") automatically added by the generator, and place the root route root 'welcome#index' (or root :to => 'welcome#index' in Rails < 4) at the top of the file, because it will probably be your most popular route and should be matched first.

Also remember to delete public/index.html in Rails < 4.

(2) The official Ruby on Rails routing guide uses PagesController. It actually suggests pages#main, though to me it makes more sense to go with pages#home (because "homepage" is the ubiquitous term/concept). Additionally, this controller can handle other page-oriented actions such as pages#about, pages#contact, pages#terms, pages#privacy, etc.

(3) The Ruby on Rails Tutorial, goes with static_pages#home and static_pages#help, etc., though I don't like the idea of denoting this controller with "static". These pages will still likely have some dynamic aspects to them, particularly the homepage!

(4) Though it does not discuss how to handle a homepage, RailsCast #117 on Semi-Static Pages suggests yet another set of approaches to show-only resources.

I feel preference toward 1 and/or 2. With the "and" scenario, you could use welcome#index and pages#about, etc., whereas with the "or" scenario, you could use pages#home, pages#about, etc. If forced to choose, I would go with option 2 just because you end up with less code. And btw, 2 and 3 are pretty much the same, apart from the word "static".

The question is, is your home page just a landing page or will it be a group of pages? If it's just a landing page, you don't expect your users to hang around there for long except to go elsewhere. If it's a group of pages, or similar to an existing group, you can add an action to the controller it's most like.

What I've done for my current project is make a controller named Static, because I need 3 static pages. The home page is one of these, because there isn't anything to see or do except go elsewhere.

To map a default route, use the following in routes.rb:

# Place at the end of the routing!
map.root :controller => 'MyController', :action => :index

In my case this would be:

map.root :controller => 'static', :action => :index

If you wish to, you could create a controller just for this home page. I'd call it main, or something that you can remember which relates to the home page. From there you can get your data and your models and defer to the output view.

class MainController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @posts = Posts.find(:all, :limit => 10, :order => 'date_posted', :include => :user)
  end
end

Assuming you have your model relationships defined correctly, the template to match it will be very simple.

Good luck, hope this helps.

I asked myself something like this when I first started Rails. Here's what you need to know:

• Models are not necessarily directly related to controllers and views.

That is, a particular controller/view combination can work with as many models as you need to generate that particular page.

The purpose of the controller is to prepare the dataset you need to display, irrespective of what models are used to store that data.

The purpose of the view is to then display that data in the most appropriate way.

In other words, controller/view combinations are never 'under' a particular model. They use models, but are not under them in any hierarchical relationship. In fact, they are peers to whatever models they use.

I think the confusion comes from the scaffold generator example found in AWDR and other introductory texts, like:

ruby script/generate scaffold model controller

I know that this implied relationship between model and controller/views confused me for a bit. But there is no strict relationship, really. If there were, then it would be very difficult to do anything complicated with the MVC approach. And clearly, that is not the case.

Hope this helps.

-- John

The best practice would be your first suggestion. Create a 'welcome' controller and call the records from whichever models you want. Have a root route point to that controller. Very clean and proper.