Restful routes

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi, I'm pretty new to the concept of restful routing and am struggling to find any rails 2 info that helps with what I'm looking for.

I have a regular scaffold setup and the routes are setup as default

map.resources :pages

I would like to be able to use titles in the url rather than relying on the id. Eg localhost:3000/pages/sometitle

instead of just

localhost:3000/pages/1

Can anyone help me out?

Thanks

2

In your model you can override the to_param method like so

  def to_param      "#{self.id}-#{self.sometitle.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]+/i, '-')}"   end

and you'll get a route like localhost:3000/pages/1-sometitle

replacing sometitle with an attribute of your model.

John

3

oops... you really don't need to specify 'self' in there, just 'id' and 'sometitle' will do.

4

Hi Dan,

I'm new to Rails myself, but I don't think you have a restful issue here. I'll make a couple of assumptions: You are calling the new page using a link_to helper and you are calling the show action.

In your link_to, you probably see a restful named route called something like pages_path(title). The sometitle is an instance variable holding the ID field. You simply want to replace that with title.sometitle. That will provide you the url you want.

But, that is only the first half. The receiving action, presumably show, expects the ID, something like: Pages.find(params[:id]). You will need to change that to Pages.find_by_title(params[:title] [:sometitle], or something similar. This assumes title is a field in the table pages.

Hope this helps.

5

Thanks guys, I'll save this thread and refer to it again. I find a lot of things in Rails seem to take me a lot longer to understand than they should:)

6

It's great that you're already trying to adhere to RESTful principles, though! Many newcomers to Rails don't start that way and end up feeling the pain later.

Jeff

REST with Rails Oct 4, 2008, in Austin, TX $295 (get 10% off with discount code "PWRRGG") http://www.purpleworkshops.com/workshops/rest-and-web-services

7

rsl's stringex library also does the same thing:

http://github.com/rsl/stringex/tree/master