correctly configuring nested resources with shallowing - ruby-on-rails

Question

I've ran into my first issue with nested resources, and from the documentation
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#limits-to-nesting
I'm not entirely able to figure out how to make sense of this, and how to apply it correctly to my situation, currently my things are setup like this:
resources :stores do
resources :locations do
resources :business_hours
end
end
now I'd like to limit the nesting, the way they recommend but I'm uncertain on how to achieve this, as locations belongs to stores, and business hours belongs to locations.

Answer 1

What the rails documentation is essentially saying is that with your resource configuration above you'll have a url that will look something like this on your web page.
mywebapplication.com/stores/1/locations/1/business_hours/1
with the corresponding rails helper method for your code
stores_locations_business_hours_url
Now there isn't really anything wrong with that and you can do it this way but you'll start to run into tedious problems especially with your business_hours controller. The reason being is because for your controllers you will have to pass in every #model object preceding the following. You'll have to do something like
stores_locations_business_hours_url([#store,#location,#business_hour])
to access a page. To limit that you will need to do something like this:
resources :stores do
resources :locations, shallow: true
end
resources :locations do
resources :business_hours
end
So now instead of mywebapplication.com/stores/1/locations/1 the url will like this mywebapplication.com/locations/1 and now your business hours url will be one level deep. That's what is meant by the documentation.

Answer 2

To go with what Rails wants you doing, all you have to do is add shallow: true to each of your nested resources:
resources :stores do
resources :locations, shallow: true do
resources :business_hours, shallow: true
end
end
This produces, as they put it, "routes with the minimal amount of information to uniquely identify the resource", which look like this:
Prefix Verb URI Pattern Controller#Action
location_business_hours GET /locations/:location_id/business_hours(.:format) business_hours#index
business_hour GET /business_hours/:id(.:format) business_hours#show
store_locations GET /stores/:store_id/locations(.:format) locations#index
location GET /locations/:id(.:format) locations#show
stores GET /stores(.:format) stores#index
store GET /stores/:id(.:format) stores#show
The collection actions for locations, eg. index, get nested under stores because locations belong to stores, but to identify a specific location, the route references locations/1 without the stores/ prefix, because you don't need a store ID to identify the location.
This cascades down the tree: to identify the business_hours collection actions, you need the location the hours belong to, but because you have a location ID, you don't need the store involved, so you get locations/:id/business_hours. When you want a specific set of hours, you don't need the location anymore, so you just get /business_hours/1.
If you want to maintain the entire hierarchy for the hours collection paths (that is, /stores/1/location/2/business_hours), you need to either not shallow your locations paths, which will keep their member actions (show, edit, etc.) under /stores/1/locations/2, or you'll need to manually specify the paths you want using less of Rails' helpers.