Rails provides RESTful routing for resources. Routes can either define single resource or plural resources to generate routes of the application.

There is a logical difference that should be considered when selecting resource or resources when generating routers.

Use of resources in Rails routes

Let’s see the routes generated when we use resources in Rails routes.

resources :products

Use of resource in Rails routes

Let’s take an example of user profile for a user logged in on website using Rails application. User profile is supposed to be an entity (resource) to be worked on when user is logged in. We would would not want end user to know the profile ID of the user. Thus,

• To view profile, route should be something like www.example.com/profile
• To edit profile, route should be something like www.example.com/profile/edit

etc.

We can define routes for profile resource as given below.

resource :profile

We can see singular resource routes don’t have ID of the resource. Moreover, it still directs requests to pluralized controller name.

Rails guides suggests:,

Sometimes, you have a resource that clients always look up without referencing an ID. For example, you would like /profile to always show the profile of the currently logged in user. In this case, you can use a singular resource.

Difference between resource and resources

• As we can see resources generated one extra route for index action. index action is intended to display list of resource.
• Singular routes don’t have ID of resource being worked on.
• Both singular and plural resource routes route request to pluralized controller.

References

• RESTful routing for resources
• Rails Routes Singular resource
• Rails Routing