Cool Stuff with the Merb Router

Today I found out something I didn't know about the merb router when looking for routing to subdomains.

I've got a route that looks like this:

  r.match(:first_subdomain => ":account_name") do |k|
    k.match("/:controller/:action") #any old route match really
  end

That will put the value of the first subdomain into params[:account_name]. Hang on though... That doesn't work by default.

How Is It So!!!?!!?

Well it turns out that when you pass a hash to r.match it uses the hash keys as method calls to the request object. It then compares the values returned to the ones you specify.

So you can have heaps of mini matchers in you matcher and all you have to do is specify a method on the request object and then use that method name as a hash key in the match. This is probably a bit dangerous so be careful with it. In this example this does the job at the top of the route file

module Merb
  class Request
    def first_subdomain
      subdomains.first
    end
  end
end