When defining new actions in controllers I often find myself asking how should I formulate the name of the action correctly. Rails default CRUD actions all seem to follow the pattern of verb (new, create, edit, update, destroy, index) but is it a bad habit to use a noun? For ex. payment_history?
I found a lot of information describing the naming conventions for different files and classes and regarding the proper syntax but none about controller#actions from formulation part.
EDIT: I am asking about custom-defined actions not renaming the Rails default CRUD actions.
In my opinion, important thing about choosing name of the action should not be based on whether it is a noun or a verb, the name of the action should describe the behavior of the action itself, whether it calculates/gets/loads/renders/etc something. So that, when another person (or you after a long time) reads the code, he/she should be able to easily understand what is this action used for and what is expected result from this action.
Otherwise you could just name it is as * whatever * since ruby doesn't prohibit you to do so.
As example we can take a look at payment_history and list_payment_history. If I am reading the code and see action named list_payment_history, I understand that it lists the history, even without looking at the code I understand the purpose of the action. However if I see payment_history, I can only understand that it has something to do with history, not the exact meaning, does it show history, or may be sort history, archive history... no concrete understanding towards the purpose of the action.