Question

I’m having a little issue…I setup a rails application that is to serve a german website. To make use of Rails’ internal pluralization features, I kept all my models in english (e.g. the model ‘JobDescription‘). Now, if I call ‘http://mysite.com/job_descriptions/‘, I get all my job_descriptions….so far, so good. Because I didn’t want the english term ‘job_descriptions‘ in my url, I put the following into my routes.rb

map.german_term '/german_term', :controller => 'job_descriptions', :action => 'index' map.german_term '/german_term/:id', :controller => 'job_descriptions', :action => 'show' 

If I call ‘http://mysite.com/german_term/‘ or ‘http://mysite.com/german_term/283‘ I get all my job_descriptions, which is fine.

However, to make the URL more SEO friendly, I’d like to exchange the id for a more userfriendly slug in the URL. Thus, I put the following in my job_description.rb:

def to_param '#{id}-#{name.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]+/i, '-')}' end 

which, whenever I use ‘job_description_path‘ in any link_to method, renders my URLs out to something like ‘http://mysite/job_descriptions/13-my-job-description-title‘.

However, and this is where I’m stuck, I’d like to get ‘http://mysite/german_term/13-my-job-description-title‘. I already tried to exchange the ‘job_description_path‘ with ‘german_term_path‘ in the link_to code, but that only generates ‘http://mysite/german_term/13‘. Obviously, to_param isn’t called. One workaround I found is to build the link with:

<%= link_to job_description.name, german_term_path(job_description.to_param) %> 

But that’s rather tedious to change all the link_to calls in my code. What I want is to replace ‘job_description‘ by ‘german_term‘ whenever it occurs in a URL.

Any thoughts?!?

Regards,

Sebastian

Answer 1

I think you’re going to need to use the restful route helpers to get what you want.

In that case, it wouldn’t take much re-factoring (assuming you’ve mapped JobDescriptions as a resource). Leave your to_param as is and change your JobDescriptions route to something like the following:

map.resources :job_descriptions, :as => 'german_term' 

Hope this helps!