Question

I have three roles: Instuctor, Student, Admin and each have controllers with a “home” view.

so this works fine,

get "instructor/home", :to => "instructor#home"
get "student/home", :to => "student#home"
get "admin/home", :to => "admin#home"

I want to write a vanity url like below which will route based on the role of the user_id to the correct home page.

get "/:user_id/home", :to => "instructor#home" or "student#home" or "admin#home"

How do I accomplish this?

Answer 1

You can’t do this with routes because the routing system does not have the information required to make this decision. All Rails knows at this point of the request is what the parameters are and does not have access to anything in the database.

What you need is a controller method that can load whatever data is required, presumably the user record, and redirects accordingly using redirect_to.

This is a fairly standard thing to do.

Update:

To perform all of this within a single controller action you will need to split up your logic according to role. An example is:

class HomeController < ApplicationController
  def home
    case
    when @user.student?
      student_home
    when @user.admin?
      admin_home
    when @user.instructor
      instructor_home
    else
      # Unknown user type? Render error or use a default.
    end
  end

protected
  def instructor_home
    # ...
    render(:template => 'instructor_home')
  end

  def student_home
    # ...
    render(:template => 'student_home')
  end

  def admin_home
    # ...
    render(:template => 'admin_home')
  end
end