Question

I’m new to rails and programming in general and I’m all turned around atm. I’ve got user’s creating posts where they add a category tag to the post, the category tag is a boolean attribute of the post model, for instance :music, :boolean, :default => false.

I’d like user’s to have a link to “Music” that renders a new page that shows all posts where :music => true. Now I understand how to create a variable and run through a block of the posts such as @music_posts = Post.where(:music => true) but I’m confused on how to make the route /posts/music and I’m not sure about my def music_posts method. Any explanation for help would be greatly appreciated.

routes.rb

  resources :posts do
      member do
      get :likers
      end
      collection do
        get :search
      end
  end  

resources :users do
     member do
     get :following, :followers, :likes
     end
end

root :to => "pages#home"

class PagesController < ApplicationController

  def home
    @title = "Home"
    @featured_posts = Post.featured.limit(10)
    if user_signed_in?
      @user = current_user
      @post = current_user.posts.build
      @feed_items = current_user.feed.paginate(:per_page => "10", :page => params[:page])
     #render :layout => 'special_layout' 
   end
  end

end

class PostsController < ApplicationController

  before_filter :authenticate_user!, :only => [:create, :edit, :update, :destroy]
  before_filter :authorized_user, :only => [:destroy, :edit, :update]

  def create
    @user = current_user
    @post = current_user.posts.build
    if @post.update_attributes(params[:post])
      flash[:success] = "Post created!"
      redirect_to root_path
    else
       @feed_items = current_user.feed.paginate(:per_page => "10", :page => params[:page])
      render 'pages/home'
    end
  end

  def index
      @posts  = Post.paginate(:page => params[:page])
    end
  end
end

  def show
    @post = Post.find(params[:id])
  end

  def edit
    @post = Post.find(params[:id])
  end

  def update
      @post = Post.find(params[:id])
      respond_to do |format|
        if @post.update_attributes(params[:post])
          format.html { redirect_to(post_path(@post), :notice => 'Post was successfully updated.') }
        else
          format.html { render :action => "edit" }  
        end
      end
    end

  def destroy
    @post.destroy
    redirect_to root_path
  end

  def likers
     @title = "Likers"
     @post = Post.find(params[:id])
     @likers = @post.likers.paginate(:page => params[:page])
     render 'show_likers' 
   end

 def music_posts
  @music_posts = Post.where(:music => true)
  render 'show_music_posts'
 end


private
  def authorized_user
    @post = Post.find(params[:id])
    redirect_to root_path unless current_user?(@post.user)
  end
end

Edit: attempting

routes

enter code here

match ‘posts/categories/*tag’ => ‘posts#categories’

posts controller

def categories
  if params[:tag].present?
    @posts  = Post.where('#{params[:tag]} = ?', true).paginate(:page => params[:page])
  end
  render 'categories'
end

I need a custom view to show them, is this all correct?

Answer 1

I am making the presumption that you might have more tags than just music, if not you could have a simpler approach by hardcoding a music route.

I believe what you want is Route Globbing, you can find details here http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html (just go to the Route Globbing section).

Basically you would create a route like:

match 'posts/*tag' => 'posts#index'

This would mean that any URL like “…/posts/something” would route to your index method in the posts controller, and would pass the “something” in as params[:tag]. You could then check if params[:tag] exists, and if so filter your results based on that, otherwise display all. It would let you have just one index method to cover all scenarios. Your index method would look something like:

def index
  if params[:tag].present?
    @posts  = Post.where('#{params[:tag]} = ?', true).paginate(:page => params[:page])
  else
    @posts  = Post.paginate(:page => params[:page])
  end
end

Doing it this way allows you to have more tags than just music, and keeps it dynamic.

One thing to note, with this route, the wildcard will take anything after /posts/ and make it pass in as the parameter, this can override your other routes like new, create, etc. Make sure you order your routes correctly for the right precedence. Even better would be to make your route /posts/tags/music to avoid this problem.