Question

I have a legacy PHP application that uses the following URL structure

/product_info.php?products_id=YYY

where YYY is the product’s ID, Product model’s id field.

I am now rewriting this application using Rails and for SEO purposes, I have to keep this URL structure for now.

How should I route the above URL to my ProductsController’s show action? Should I use Apache’s mod_rewrite to rewrite it to /products/:id or can I do it with Rails’ router? I would love to be able to use path helpers so that product_path(@product) returns me /product_info.php?products_id=YYY (again for SEO)

Answer 1

This is actually more straightforward than I expected it to be.

First, set up your route:

# config/routes.rb
MyApp::Application.routes.draw do
  match '/product_info' => 'products#show'
end

Since Rails doesn’t normally serve PHP files, you’ll need to create a MIME type handler for .php:

# config/initializers/mime_types.rb
Mime::Type.register_alias 'text/html', :php

Set up your products#show action to find the product based on the URL parameter. Since you aliased the php MIME type to text/html, you don’t have to do anything special to render the “PHP” view:

# app/controllers/products_controller.rb
class ProductsController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @product = Product.find(params[:products_id])
  end
end

You’ll have to manually create the product_path helper method, since you’re not using RESTful routes:

# app/helpers/products_helper.rb
module ProductsHelper
  def product_path(product)
    "/product_info.php?products_id=#{product.id}"
  end
end

Now just create your view:

# app/views/products/show.php.erb
<%= link_to @product.name, @product %>