I'm new at Rails, but I think I understand the concept. Now I'm
trying to map that to what I've done in the past with JSP/Java/Tomcat,
and I have a specific problem I need to solve.
A client likes to have his registered users have their own portal
pages, like "thesite.com/someuser". In JSP I just added logic to the
404 handling such that if the path name "someuser" was a registered
user in the database, then it would generate a page appropriate for
them. Then, since this was a referral-based system (in terms of
membership-benefits), if the visitor signed up on someuser's page,
someuser would get credit for it.
How, in Rails, might such a thing be done? Would it be a hack like
what I did on Tomcat in JSP, with 404 handling? Or is there some
other facility for _faking_ pages that don't exist?
An example or other explanation of similar systems would be wonderful.
blunte wrote:
> A client likes to have his registered users have their own portal
pages, like "thesite.com/someuser". In JSP I just added logic to the
404 handling such that if the path name "someuser" was a registered
user in the database, then it would generate a page appropriate for
them. Then, since this was a referral-based system (in terms of
membership-benefits), if the visitor signed up on someuser's page,
someuser would get credit for it.
How, in Rails, might such a thing be done? Would it be a hack like
what I did on Tomcat in JSP, with 404 handling? Or is there some
other facility for _faking_ pages that don't exist?
I think you'd basically do it the same way. Map an action as the last-resort action and in there try to look up a user for the path. If you don't find a user /then/ you do the 404.
Read up on routes.rb... in fact, the comments in the generated routes.rb might be enough.