The 7 Restful Routes

What is a route?

Whenever you click through a site you’re making a request to the server to take you to a different destination. They receive request and decide what to send back to the user. Restful routes are just conventions developers follow whenever to interact with the server.

CRUD!

What is CRUD? Create, read, update and delete, these are the four basic types of functionality for our application.

1.Index

The index route is a get request which is used to display all the content. A get request is used to retrieve and request data from a specified resource in the server. For example — if I had a website about books, the index would show all of the books and their data that I have stored in my server.

2. New

The new route is also a get request, which is used to show a form for the user to create new content. In my books website — I would have a form for the user to create a new book that would allow them to enter something like a title, author and a book snippet.

3. Create

The create route is a post request. The post request method requests that a web server accepts the data enclosed in the body of the request message, most likely for storing it. This would then add the data entered to the database.

4. Show

The show route is a get request. An exmaple in our book app would be to show a book and all information about that book. Another example is if you imagine IMDB, once you’ve clicked on a film you will see a lot of different information about a specific film, that would be that films show page.

5. Edit

The edit route is also a get request. Edit will allow us to as you’ve probably guessed, is used to edit something on our app. This would then store the new information to the database and present it. For example in a book app if you wanted to add a longer snippet for a specific book this would be done through a form on the edit page.

6. Update

The update route is a put request. The put request is used to replace an existing resource or create a new one if it does not exist.

7. Destroy

The destroy route is a delete request. A delete request is delete is for deleting the resource, the delete method requests that you delete the origin from the server. This would be used to remove some or all information about something in our app.

Why this is useful:

By following these conventions you have a good structure for a working application. These will essentially be the pillars of all apps that can be used in all projects.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog post! If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I will get back to you.