Rails /(year)/(month)/(day) separate pages - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm very new to rails and am having some trouble. I have a model called BusinessDates that consists of two tables, calendar_date and seasonality (you can ignore seasonality). What I'm trying to achieve is to be able to move through them easily like folders.
It took me a few solid days of google-foo, but I was able to have the index display a list of each unique year in order as links with friendly_ids. From here I want to click on it and have it link to a new view that displays a list of each unique month in that particular year in order as links with friendly_ids. Then (as you could guess) have it display on another new view a list of all the days in the selected month in the selected year. I want the url to be business_dates/2016/5/21 or in other words business_dates/(year)/(month)/(day).
My issue: I don't know where to go from here. I can't even seem to find any info on making a second level deep non-static url without either making each year month and day separate models (want to avoid that), or what looks like a rube goldberg machine to kinda get there but without views for each page (You'd have to just type the full date into the url).
Please help a beginner who feels very lost!
Controller:
def index
#years = BusinessDate.pluck(:calendar_date).map{|x| x.year}.uniq
end
index.erb.html
<table>
<tr>
<th>Year</th>
</tr>
<% #years.sort.each do |year| %>
<tr>
<td><%= link_to year, business_date_path(year) %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
</table>

Answer 1

You can create a custom route. Since I don't know the exact controller actions etc that you are using, I will give you a general answer. You can route like (will hit BusinessDatesController's :show_full_date action):
get 'business_dates/:year/:month/:day', to: 'business_dates#show_full_date'
You can link to it like (run rake routes to check correct path):
<%= link_to your_date, full_date_business_dates_path('1985','5','21') %>
The important thing to understand here is that the path helper is in the end just a method that can take arguments. What it can accept is defined in the routes.rb. So, in our case, it will :year, :month and :day parameters.
Once you click this link and hit the :show_full_date action, you can extract the year, month, date using params[:year], params[:month], params[:day] and do with them whatever you need to do. You can similarly define routes for just the year or the month. Hope this helps.
EDIT: You can also give the as: option in the route definition to give a specific name to the path, like as: 'my_funky_name'.
Also, I should add that you should keep such custom routes to a minimum. When it is necessary, then do it. Otherwise stick to the defaults.

Answer 2

I finally figured it out and got it working, so I'll share my answer. big props to arunt for the help! It's a bit messy and probably not the right way I should be doing this, but my first goal was to get it to work and learn how it works along the way. Now I'm looking to tidy up and learn best practices.
Routes
Rails.application.routes.draw do
resources :business_dates, except: :show
get '/business_dates/:year/:month/:day', to: 'business_dates#edit_date', as: 'edit_date'
get '/business_dates/:year/:month', to: 'business_dates#by_days', as: 'by_days'
get '/business_dates/:year', to: 'business_dates#by_months', as: 'by_months'
delete '/business_dates/:year/:month/:day', to: 'business_dates#delete_date', as: 'delete_date'
Controller
class BusinessDatesController < ApplicationController
def index
#business_dates = BusinessDate.all
#years = BusinessDate.pluck(:calendar_date).map{|x| x.year}.uniq
end
def new
#date = BusinessDate.new
end
def by_months
#months = BusinessDate.where("strftime('%Y', calendar_date) = ?", params[:year])
#months = #months.pluck(:calendar_date).map{|x| x.strftime('%m')}.uniq
end
def by_days
#days = BusinessDate.where("cast(strftime('%Y', calendar_date) as int) = ? AND cast(strftime('%m', calendar_date) as int) = ?", params[:year], params[:month])
end
def edit_date
set_business_date
end
def create
#date = BusinessDate.new(date_params)
if #date.valid?
#date.save
redirect_to by_days_path(#date.calendar_date.year, "%02d" % #date.calendar_date.month)
else
flash.now[:alert] = "New business date could not be saved"
render action: "new"
end
end
def update
#set_business_date
#date = BusinessDate.find(params[:id])
#date.update(date_params)
redirect_to by_days_path(#date.calendar_date.year, "%02d" % #date.calendar_date.month)
end
def delete_date
set_business_date
#date.destroy
redirect_to by_days_path(params[:year], params[:month])
end
private
def set_business_date
#date = BusinessDate.where("cast(strftime('%Y', calendar_date) as int) = ? AND cast(strftime('%m', calendar_date) as int) = ? AND cast(strftime('%d', calendar_date) as int) = ?", params[:year], params[:month], params[:day]).first
end
def date_params
params.require(:business_date).permit(:calendar_date, :seasonality)
end
end
index.html.erb
<h1>Business Dates by Year</h1>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Calendar Date</th>
</tr>
<% #years.sort.each do |year| %>
<tr>
<td><%= link_to year, business_date_path(year) %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
</table>
<br>
<%= link_to 'Create New Business Date', new_business_date_path %>
by_months.html.erb
<h1><%= params[:year] %></h1>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Months</th>
</tr>
<% #months.sort.each do |month| %>
<tr>
<td><%= link_to Date::MONTHNAMES[month.to_i], by_days_path(params[:year], month) %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
</table>
<br>
<%= link_to 'Create New Business Date', new_business_date_path %>
<br>
<%= link_to 'Back to Years', business_dates_path %>
by_days.html.erb
<h1><%= Date::MONTHNAMES[params[:month].to_i] %>, <%= params[:year] %> <%= params[:id] %></h1>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Date</th>
<th>Seasonality</th>
<th>ID</th>
</tr>
<% #days.sort.each do |day| %>
<tr>
<td><%= day.calendar_date.day %></td>
<td><%= day.seasonality %></td>
<% %>
<td><%= day.id %></td>
<td><%= link_to 'Edit', edit_date_path(day.calendar_date.year, "%02d" % day.calendar_date.month, day.calendar_date.day) %></td>
<td><%= link_to 'Delete', delete_date_path(day.calendar_date.year, "%02d" % day.calendar_date.month, day.calendar_date.day), method: :delete, data: { confirm: 'Are you sure?' } %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
</table>
<br>
<%= link_to 'Create New Business Date', new_business_date_path %>
<br>
<%= link_to 'Back to Months', by_months_path %>
<br>
<%= link_to 'Back to Years', business_dates_path %>
It's all working fine, but I wish I could figure out my :id issue. Not sure how to find a record by :id while using the :year/:month/:day url convention. It's not an issue for this app, considering there should never be more than one of the same date, but it'd be helpful and I'm sure it would cut down on having to search for the record by params[:year],[:month], and [:day]. This thing was a holy terror, but I certainly learned a lot about the differences between arrays, hashes, symbols, attributes, models, methods, and instance variables along the way!