Underlying many of the path helpers that we use day to day when building out the views in our Rails apps are a set of methods in the ActionDispatch::Routing::PolymorphicRoutes module.

The #polymorphic_path method given an instance of a model will produce the relevant show path.

> app.polymorphic_path(Article.first)
  Article Load (0.5ms)  SELECT  "articles".* FROM "articles"  ORDER BY "articles"."id" ASC LIMIT 1
=> "/articles/2"

Given just the model’s constant, it will produce the index path.

> app.polymorphic_path(Article)
=> "/articles"

Additionally, there are variants with edit_ and new_ prefixed for generating the edit and new paths respectively.

> app.edit_polymorphic_path(Article.first)
  Article Load (0.6ms)  SELECT  "articles".* FROM "articles"  ORDER BY "articles"."id" ASC LIMIT 1
=> "/articles/2/edit"
> app.new_polymorphic_path(Article)
=> "/articles/new"