Using static name as unique key instead of id in some table

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I am not sure if this is best practice or not. or it is a stupid question.

Using static name as unique key instead of id in some table. What I mean by static name is the unique name from the actual field name For example : "San francisco" become "san_francisco" (it automatically replace space or others not character to "_")

Reason to use this way 1. User friendly url   so someone can type domain.com/san_francisco

Cons of not using it 1. need to customize route.rb to use static name 2. others table that reference this 3. performance in database indexing 4. slower database query 5. Others table start to use "static_name" instead of id to reference to this table

Thank you in advance, any feedback are welcome

2

I believe you can have the besto of both worlds:

In the City model (as u said san francisco):

validate_uniqueness_of :name

in the routes

map.connect '/:city_name', :controller => 'cities', :action => 'show'

in the controller

def show    @city = City.find_by_name(params[:city_name]) end

you can have id as all other tables (not having it just seems too bad idea) you can have pretty urls

j

3

There's an even easier way. Use the friendly identifier plugin:

http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/friendly_identifier

With a single line of code in your model:

friendly_identifier :name, :identifier_column => :name

you get the pretty URLs you want without breaking the Rails default behavior with id's.

Beta Beta wrote:

4

Excellent tips, thanks Wolas and Brent Miller