Steve Madsen
Rails 1.2.4, RESTful Routes and Custom Actions

If you use RESTful routes and define custom actions for your resources, you might suddenly find your custom action don’t work after upgrading to 1.2.4. Whereas this used to work fine in 1.2.3:

map.resources :users
map.resources :users, :collection => { :signin => :any,
                                       :signout => :post,
                                       :forgot_password => :any,
                                       :welcome => :get }
map.resources :member => { :email => :get,
                                     :prefs => :get,
                                     :close => :post }

This is actually wrong, and creates duplicate entries in the routing table. The symptom of this problem is that your custom actions (e.g. /users/signin) will run the show action with a bogus ID of signin.

The proper way to define these resource routes is in one shot:

map.resources :users, :collection => { :signin => :any,
                                       :signout => :post,
                                       :forgot_password => :any,
                                       :welcome => :get },
                      :member => { :email => :get,
                                   :prefs => :get,
                                   :close => :post }

(Thanks to wolfmanjm on the rubyonrails-talk list for posting and answering his own question, as I was having the exact same problem.)