Question

I am running Ruby on Rails 3 and I would like to set up my routes to show additional information in the URL using namespaces.

In the routes.rb file I have:

namespace "users" do
  resources :account
end

So, the URL to show an account page is:

http://<site_name>/users/accounts/1

I would like to rewrite/redirect that URL as/to

http://<site_name>/user/1/Test_Username

where “Test_username” is the username of the user. Also, I would like to redirect all URLs like

# "Not_real_Test_username" is a bad entered username of the user.
http://<site_name>/users/accounts/1/Not_real_Test_username

to the above.

---

At this time I solved part of my issuelike this:

  scope :module => "users" do
    match 'user/:id' => "accounts#show"
  end

Answer 1

My apologies for not answering your question (@zetetic has done that well enough), but the best practice here is to stay within the RESTful-style Rails URL scheme except for rare exceptions. The way most people make pretty URLs in this way is to use a hyphen, e.g.:

/accounts/1-username

This does not require any routing changes. Simply implement:

class Account < ActiveRecord::Base
  def to_param
    "#{self.id}-#{self.username}"
  end
end

And handle the extra string data in your finds by calling to_i.

class AccountController < ApplicationController
   def show
     @account = Account.find(params[:id].to_i)
   end
end

When you do link_to 'Your Account', account_path(@account), Rails will automatically produce the pretty URL.