Question

I am having a product controller which allows me to access the show method in the usual rails way

product GET    /products/:id(.:format)                 products#show

Now, I would like to have a unique hash url for each product, which can be accessed at the root path e.g.
mydomain.com/24fe3455g

What would be the best way to do this?

Best
Philip

Answer 1

First of all, you need to define a matching route in your routes.rb. Since it kind of a “fall through” you would usually put it at the end of the routes. have a look at the guides for how to define that: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html

if you want to always use this hash-style urls throughout your application instead of ids, you would also implement to_param and self.from_param methods in your model: http://apidock.com/rails/ActiveRecord/Base/to_param

you could also use a gem like friendly_id if you like some tool support: http://rubydoc.info/github/norman/friendly_id/master/file/Guide.rdoc