Question

I’m new to Rails. I’m developing a store builder.

What I want

I want a root level url for each shop.

http://greatsite.com/my-shop-name

My Solution

shop_controller.rb

def show
    if params[:url]
     @shop_ref = params[:url]
     @shop = Shop.where(:url => @shop_ref).first
    else
     @shop_ref = params[:id]
     @shop = Shop.find(@shop_ref)
     redirect_to "/" + @shop.url 
     return
    end

    if @shop.nil?
     render 'show_invalid_shop', :object => @shop_ref and return
    end

    render 'show' =>  @shop
end

def create
    @shop_url = (0...8).map{65.+(rand(25)).chr}.join.downcase
    @shop = Shop.new(:url => @shop_url)
    if @shop.save
        redirect_to "/" + @shop.url
    else
        render :action => "new"
    end
end

routes.rb

...
resources :shops
match ':url' => 'shops#show', :constraints => { :url => /[a-z|0-9]{4,30}/ }
...

The Problem

Crap Performance. (It’s ugly as sin too, of course.)

Every time someone creates a new shop (which is one click from our home page), it creates a new shop and does a redirect. In New Relic, I see this is killing performance – a lot of time is spent in “Request Queuing”.

Is there any neater and faster way of achieving what I want?

Answer 1

I’m not sure why the redirects would be causing such a headache, but:

Could you do something like:

• Create the shop via an AJAX call.
• On a successful create via AJAX render the show view, and return the html “string”.
• Replace the contents of the page with JS, and use pushstate to update the URL.

Might be useful to look at: http://pjax.heroku.com/

It’s not exactly pretty, but if redirects are really that bad it might help?