CANONICAL_ACTIONS holds all actions that does not need a prefix or a path appended since they fit properly in their scope level.

Resource routing allows you to quickly declare all of the common routes for a given resourceful controller. Instead of declaring separate routes for your index, show, new, edit, create, update and destroy actions, a resourceful route declares them in a single line of code:

resources :photos

Sometimes, you have a resource that clients always look up without referencing an ID. A common example, /profile always shows the profile of the currently logged in user. In this case, you can use a singular resource to map /profile (rather than /profile/:id) to the show action.

resource :profile

It's common to have resources that are logically children of other resources:

resources :magazines do
  resources :ads
end

You may wish to organize groups of controllers under a namespace. Most commonly, you might group a number of administrative controllers under an admin namespace. You would place these controllers under the app/controllers/admin directory, and you can group them together in your router:

namespace "admin" do
  resources :posts, :comments
end

By default the :id parameter doesn't accept dots. If you need to use dots as part of the :id parameter add a constraint which overrides this restriction, e.g:

resources :articles, id: /[^\/]+/

This allows any character other than a slash as part of your :id.