Is it a bad idea to reload routes dynamically in Rails?

Question

I have an application I\'m writing where I\'m allowing the administrators to add aliases for pages, categories, etc, and I would like to use a different controller/action depend

Answer 1

I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but you could use method_missing in your controllers and then lookup the alias, maybe like this:

class MyController
  def method_missing(sym, *args)
    aliased = Alias.find_by_action_name(sym)
    # sanity check here in case no alias

    self.send( aliased.real_action_name )
    # sanity check here in case the real action calls a different render explicitly
    render :action => aliased.real_action_name
  end

  def normal_action
    @thing = Things.find(params[:id])
  end
end

If you wanted to optimize that, you could put a define_method in the method_missing, so it would only be 'missing' on the first invocation, and would be a normal method from then on.