I've been reading everything about routes but I can't seem to make this work..
I have a projects controller and my projects table contains id and name fields
I want to be able to navigate to myurl.com/projects/"name" instead of the default method or /projects/"id"
Seems like this should be pretty basic but I haven't been able to get it to work.
Appreciate the help.
Im having similar problems.
Im a total newbie and cant really understand how routes.rb generates default routes and paths in rails2.0.
EG:
<td><%= link_to 'Show', user_path(user) %></td> <td><%= link_to 'Edit', edit_user_path(user) %></td> <td><%= link_to 'Destroy', user, :confirm => 'Are you sure?', :method => :delete %></td>
Seems to render paths like this in my index
/appname/users/ for Show /appname/users//edit/ for Edit /appname/users/ for Destroy
What do I have to do to get things like user_path(user), edit_user_path(user), etc to render properly?
Should have said I have the following in my routes.rb file already
ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map| map.resources :users
map.users 'users', :controller => "users", :action => "index" map.show_user 'user/:id', :controller => "users", :action => "show" map.edit_user 'user/:id/edit', :controller => "users", :action => "edit"
end
Am I missing something stupid?
Dale Cunnigham wrote:
Should have said I have the following in my routes.rb file already
ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map| map.resources :users
map.users 'users', :controller => "users", :action => "index" map.show_user 'user/:id', :controller => "users", :action => "show" map.edit_user 'user/:id/edit', :controller => "users", :action => "edit"
end
Am I missing something stupid?
As an exercise for the reader, comment your three map statements in routes.rb, then run a rake routes (I usually route that output to a file for easier reading). At first glance, you shouldn't need any of your custom maps.
@polomasta: You need to read up on how Rails does its route matching...
maybe it's as easy as changing the controller code to check if the :id parameter is an int, perform a Project.find(:params[:id]), otherwise give the name based search a go Project.find_by_name(params[:id]) <- doesn't really matter what the param is called
As an exercise for the reader, comment your three map statements in routes.rb, then run a rake routes (I usually route that output to a file for easier reading). At first glance, you shouldn't need any of your custom maps.
Ok so on removing my custom map routes and raking I get the following:
(in /home/webbie/peoplesearch) users GET /users {:controller=>"users", :action=>"index"} formatted_users GET /users.:format {:controller=>"users", :action=>"index"} POST /users {:controller=>"users", :action=>"create"} POST /users.:format {:controller=>"users", :action=>"create"} new_user GET /users/new {:controller=>"users", :action=>"new"} formatted_new_user GET /users/new.:format {:controller=>"users", :action=>"new"} edit_user GET /users/:id/edit {:controller=>"users", :action=>"edit"} formatted_edit_user GET /users/:id/edit.:format {:controller=>"users", :action=>"edit"} user GET /users/:id {:controller=>"users", :action=>"show"} formatted_user GET /users/:id.:format {:controller=>"users", :action=>"show"} PUT /users/:id {:controller=>"users", :action=>"update"} PUT /users/:id.:format {:controller=>"users", :action=>"update"} DELETE /users/:id {:controller=>"users", :action=>"destroy"} DELETE /users/:id.:format {:controller=>"users", :action=>"destroy"}
This looks ok to me (Like that means anything 
) but It still renders
the routes in exactly the same fashion.
user_path(user) and edit_user_path(user) both appear to render nothing at all. Rather than /appname/id_no/ and /appname/id_no/edit/
Is there perhaps something I need to set up in another config file.
Annoyingly most of the documentation out there appears to be for rails
1.2 and not 2.0 
Hmm... could you post your index.html.erb (or whatever) code?
Ar Chron wrote:
Hmm... could you post your index.html.erb (or whatever) code?
Ok sure index.html.erb is
<h1>Listing users</h1>
<table> <tr> </tr>
<% for user in @users %> <tr> <td><%= h user.ID %></td> <td><%= h user.SurName %></td> <td><%= h user.ForeName %></td> <td><%= h user.Title %></td> <td><%= h user.RoomNo %></td> <td><%= h user.PhoneNo %></td> <td><%= h user.EMail %></td>
<td><%= link_to 'Show', user_path(user) %></td> <td><%= link_to 'Edit', edit_user_path(user) %></td> <td><%= link_to 'Destroy', user, :confirm => 'Are you sure?', :method => :delete %></td> </tr> <% end %> </table>
<br />
<%= link_to 'New user', new_user_path %>
Dang... that looks pretty vanilla to me. What about the page source from the browser? edit_user_path and user_path are just helpers that create the href's... and should be equivalent to you typing in something like:
<%= link_to 'Show', :controller => 'users', :action => 'show', :id => user.id %>
in your view code.
Any chance that you have a borked install of Rails? I might try an update of Rails to see if it cleared up the issue.
Ar Chron wrote:
<%= link_to 'Show', :controller => 'users', :action => 'show', :id => user.id %>
Interestingly if I put that code in, the page fails as user.id doesn't exist, I think I've messed something up in the initial app set-up with my "./script/generate scaffold Users" command.
I shall delete the app and start again from scratch I think.
Thanks for the help so far though.
Got it! I knew it would be really simple.
Thanks for the responses
polomasta wrote:
I've been reading everything about routes but I can't seem to make this work..
I have a projects controller and my projects table contains id and name fields
I want to be able to navigate to myurl.com/projects/"name" instead of the default method or /projects/"id"
Seems like this should be pretty basic but I haven't been able to get it to work.
Appreciate the help.
The most common way to do this is to override the to_param method on your model. When rails generates a route for a model it calls to_param on that model object, which ends up in the :id spot on your url. By default, this returns the id.
If you add something like this to your model, where permalink is a database field on that model:
def to_param permalink end
Then when you generate routes for that model object it will look like:
/thingies/my_cool_permalink
Now you just need to change how you fetch your models. On your show action, change the standard
@thingy = Thingy.find(params[:id])
to
@thingy = Thing.find_by_permalink(params[:id])