How to upgrade Ruby on Rails Restful routes to 2.0

Ok, you were quite proud when on Rails 1.2.x you made your app restful.
Now in 2.0 REST has been improved cleaned reworked and... changed the naming of the nested Routes

Let's take a look at the differences in 1.2.x

the following code

map.resources :dinners do |dinner|
  dinner.resources :dishes do |dish|
    dish.resources :side_courses
  end
  dinner.resources :drinks
end

would generate (among many others)

 dinners_url
 dinner_url

 dishes_url
 dish_url

 side_courses_url
 side_course_url

 drinks_url
 drink_url

and so on.
With the same code in the routes rails 2.0 generates

 dinners_url
 dinner_url

 dinner_dishes_url
 dinner_dish_url

 dinner_dish_side_courses_url
 dinner_dish_side_course_url

 dinner_drinks_url
 dinner_drink_url

And your REST routes methods will change more if you use the new routes namespacing introduced with 2.0
This is good and much nicer, and is a great help in complicated applications that use the same resources at different nesting levels and for different purposes.

But it means that to migrate from 1.2.x you've got to change many of your original calls to the *_url or *_path methods.

Well, I wrote a small dodgy script to manage the search and replace of the old routes with the new ones.

And I thought I'd share it...

The script should run as it is on linux. It uses find/grep/sed system commands.

first two steps are quite simple

1. upgrade a non critical copy of your rails app to version 2.0 of ruby on rails


2. download the script to migrate your routes from 1.2 to 2.0 and save it in the root directory of your rails project


3. execute script/console and type the following
   

   
   require 'route_migrator'
   
   RouteMigrator.dump_current_route_methods
   

   
   


4. exit from the console and open with a text editor the file route_map_2_0.rb. This file should contain a ruby hash with keys and values containing the old routes


5. now you have to update the values of the hash with the new routes, for the previous example a line would look like
   
   

   
   "side_courses_url" => "side_courses_url"
   

   
   
   and you need to update it to
   
   

   
   "side_courses_url" => "dinner_dish_side_courses_url"
   

   
   
   If you don't have a clear idea about what the new routes are you can use
   

   
   rake routes
   

   
   
   or open again script/console and type
   
   

   
   require 'route_migrator'
   
   RouteMigrator.dump_named_routes
   

   
   Be aware of that the hash might contain some rubbish as keys, just delete the lines that you think aren't proper routes actually used in your applications,
   


6. When you think your hash is complete and ready to go you can check your work firing yet another time your script/console and typing
   

   
   require 'route_migrator'
   
   RouteMigrator.check_new_routes
   

   
   This will output a warning if you've typed in the hash some routes that are not in the list generated from 2.0
   


7. If the previous check succeeded you can try the following that will substitute every occurrence odf your old routes with the new ones
   WARNING: this script is guaranteed to screw up >>BADLY<< your code if you use it without understanding what it does. Read the source code of the script before proceeding. As always svn diff and svn revert will be your friends
   

   
   require 'route_migrator'
   
   RouteMigrator.upgrade_route_methods!
   

   
   At this point your application should be updated with the new routes