Question

I’m attempting to create “pretty URLs” for linking to posts in a blog. I want to maintain access to the blog entries via entries/23 and 2011/07/some-post-slug-here as I only generate a slug once an entry has been published (just in case the title of the posts changes, and, though not a strict requirement, I would prefer to be able to edit/delete posts via the entries/23 style URL. Currently, the appropriate part of what I have in my config/routes.rb:

root :to => 'entries#index'
resources :entries

match ':year/:month/:slug' => 'entries#show', :constraints => {
  :year => /[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/,
  :month => /[0-9][0-9]/,
  :slug => /[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+/
}, :as => :vanity_entry

and I use this (in my application helper) function for creating the links:

def appropriate_entry_path entry
  if entry.published
    vanity_entry_path entry.published_on.year.to_s, entry.published_on.month.to_s, entry.slug
  else
    entries_path entry
  end
end

def appropriate_entry_url entry
  if entry.published
    vanity_entry_url entry.published_on.year.to_s, entry.published_on.month.to_s, entry.slug
  else
    entries_url entry
  end
end

Basically, I check if the article is published (and therefore has a slug) and then use that URL/path helper, or otherwise use the default one.

However, when trying to use this, I get the following from Rails:

No route matches {:slug=>"try-this-one-on-for", :month=>"7", :controller=>"entries", :year=>"2011", :action=>"show"}

I have tried a few different solutions, including overriding to_param in my Entry model, however then I would have to create match routes for the edit/delete actions, and I would like to keep my routes.rb file as clean as possible. Ideally, I would also love to lose the appropriate_entry_path/appropriate_entry_url helper methods, but I’m not sure that this is possible?

Is there any thing I am missing regarding routing that might make this easier and/or is there any specific way of doing this that is the cleanest?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I found the issue with what I had been doing, the regex for :month in the route wanted two numbers, whereas I was only passing in one number. Anyways, I decided that the URLs look nicer (in my opinion) without the month padded to 2 digits, so I updated my route accordingly.