Question

I have a set of nested resources — :users and :messages.

  resources :users, :only => [:show,:index] do
    resources :messages
  end

And also a formtastic form in the “new.html.haml” template for the Message model and it needs to use these resources:

=semantic_form_for [@user,@message] do |f|
 =f.input :title

The problem is in the actual action path that is generated from [@user,@message], and it looks like this:

/users/4cdc7f9dfae434029a0000aa/messages

This is wrong because I am using a named route, so this should look like “/users/nickname/messages”

How can I make sure that @user produces a proper path output?

Edit: Here is the name routes I am using to slugify the user.

  match "/users/:nickname/messages" => "messages#index"
  match "/users/:nickname/messages/new" => "messages#new", :as=>:new_message
  match "/users/:nickname/messages" => "messages#create", :as=>:create_message

Answer 1

I guess what you want is to use the nickname as the url slug. What you need for that is just the regular nested resources;

# in routes.rb

resources :users do
  resources :messages
end

which would give you the same routes except they would have :id instead of :nickname in there.

Now for the actual trick that lets you use the user’s nickname as the url identifier:

# user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def to_param
    self.nickname
  end
end

You would automatically get the nickname in the url, and have it passed on to your controllers as params[:id] so you have to act accordingly in your controller

# users_controller.rb
…
def show
  @user = User.find_by_nickname(params[:id])
end
…