Rails - Oct 2009 - RESTful Routing - Difference between new, collection, member

I''m re-working an application from scratch to make use of REST-based
resource routing for the first time.  In doing some reading, I found
the Rails guide (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html) to be
really helpful, but I don''t quite understand the difference between
"new", "collection" and "member" when defining
additional routes on a
resource.  Could somebody clear that up a little - preferably with
some "real world" examples?  The examples in the rails guide seemed
pretty ambiguous.

Phoenix Rising wrote:
> I''m re-working an application from scratch to make use of
REST-based
> resource routing for the first time.  In doing some reading, I found
> the Rails guide (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html) to be
> really helpful, but I don''t quite understand the difference
between
> "new", "collection" and "member" when
defining additional routes on a
> resource.  Could somebody clear that up a little - preferably with
> some "real world" examples?  The examples in the rails guide
seemed
> pretty ambiguous.
An action that acts upon a collection of the resource is defined with 
collection and has a route that reflects that:

For example the index action acts upon a collection of the resource:
GET: /posts

An action that acts upon a single instance of a resource is defined with 
member and has a route that reflects that:

The show, create, update and delete actions are examples:
GET: /posts/1
POST: /posts/1
PUT: /posts/1
DELETE: /posts/1

An action using ''new'' also acts upon the collection but allows
for
additional actions that create new instances.

Example:
map.resources :photos, :new => { :upload => :post }

Allows Rails to recognize the following request:
POST: /photos/upload

and route the request to the upload action of the resource''s
controller.
This would be in addition to the ''normal'' CRUD request:
POST: /photos

This request could also be used to create new instances of the photos 
resource by routing to the create action.
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