Controllers & Actions

Now that we’ve defined routes for Products, let’s implement the controller and actions to handle requests to these URLs.

This command will generate a ProductsController with an index action. Since we’ve already set up routes, we can skip that part of the generator using a flag.

$ bin/rails generate controller Products index --skip-routes

This command generates a handful of files for our controller:

• The controller itself
• A views folder for the controller we generated
• A view file for the action we specified when generating the controller
• A test file for this controller
• A helper file for extracting logic in our views

Let’s take a look at the ProductsController defined in app/controllers/products_controller.rb. It should look like this:

class ProductsController < ApplicationController
  def index
  end
end

The index method here is an Action. Even though it’s an empty method, Rails will default to rendering a template with the matching name.

The index action will render app/views/products/index.html.erb. If we open up that file in our code editor, we’ll see the HTML it renders.

<h1>Products#index</h1>
<p>Find me in app/views/products/index.html.erb</p>