Question

An application I am working on in Rails 3 has a City model. Each City has a “name” column. I want this City.name to be the base url.

For example, with the City Name “Los Angeles”: http://myapp.com/los-angeles.

If I use

match '/:name' => "cities#show"
resources :cities

I can get http://myapp.com/Los%20Angeles, but I need it to be ‘los-angeles’. I assume I need to change the to_params in the city.rb file.

Additionally, what should my link_to look like when this is working? Right now I am trying

 <%= link_to "View", city_path(:name => @city.name) %>

And that is giving me this error:

No route matches {:action=>"destroy", :name=>"Los Angeles", :controller=>"cities"}

Finally, you should note that I plan on nesting resources underneath the City in the routes so that I end up with urls like http://myapp.com/los-angeles/messages/message-content-using-to-param

etc..

Any advice you could give would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I personally use Friendly Id to handle pretty URLs with hooks into ActiveRecord(really nice by the way). This gem has nested resource support as well.