I changed the format to be nicer - using the name of the properties and
seperating with a +
/resources/browse/72-Violin+722-Pieces
The '+' acts as a join between two property ids effectively, so in the
controller the last part is split on +, and the above is equivalent to
the first url.
This all works fine, and gives a nicer url. However, will_paginate is
now doing something strange - the paginate links for the page now come
out like this:
/resources/browse/72-Violin/722-Pieces?page=3
where i'd expect them to be this, ie to just add the param to the end of
whatever the current page is:
/resources/browse/72-Violin+722-Pieces?page=3
Before/while i dive into the guts of will_paginate to see what might be
going wrong, can anyone shed any light?
This was nothing to do with will_paginate at all - it was down to me
doing something bad in the controller. It's maybe a bit of a gotcha.
There was a key in params called :property_ids, which could point to a
string or an array. If it's a string, then i need to split it on the +
sign and turn it into an array.
The problem was i was doing this by altering the contents of params
itself, like this:
if params[:property_ids].is_a?(String)
params[:property_ids] = params[:property_ids].split("+")
end
This was then being passed through to the page, in @template.params,
which will_paginate uses, and the change from the string to an array was
making will_paginate go wrong, generating an invalid url.
So, the lesson here is 'don't alter params, copy the value out into a
variable and then do the manipulation on that'.
I ended up doing a tour into the guts of will_paginate, and then all the
way back out again, just to discover this. doh.
