Question

I want to have a button which goes to a random user on my site. I am using the friendly_id gem so the URLs are, for example, /users/dean and I’ve also set it up so its /dean.

I’m guessing I would add something similar to this in my routes.rb file:

match '/users/random' => 'users#index'

And then some extra code in the user controller?

How would I go about doing this?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

I’d do this:

Define a class method random on User model (or in a module that’s included into your model if you’d want to reuse it for other models later).

class User
  def self.random
    offset = rand(count)
    first(:offset => offset)
  end
end

Other ways of getting a random record, if performance becomes an issue.

Add a random action in your UsersController like this

def random
  redirect_to User.random
end

And finally create a route

match '/users/random' => 'users#random'