Atrocious Rails API doc of the week by jgn on Thursday, November 27, 2008 in Rails

Here's an example of some atrocious Rails API documentation.

(I say "of the week" which raised the question whether I could really find an atrocious Rails doc every week . . . but I probably can.)

Here's the doc for the link_to helper:

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/UrlHelper.html#M001378

Notice that there is a heading "Options" describing keys such as :confirm, :popup, etc.

Well guess what? Those Options are for the second Hash, i.e., html_options. How a newbie would ever figure this out is beyond me. I suppose you're supposed to follow the link over to url_for and figure out that those options are for the first Hash . . . and then somehow that the "Options" given for link_to are for the 2nd Hash. One of my students in my Harvard Ruby/Rails course stumbled across this.