Question

I’m trying to set up rails to use both the ID and the Handle (which is just an URL safe version of the title) of a blog post in the route.

match '/articles/:id/:handle', :to => 'articles#show'
resources :articles

This works, of course — but I can’t seem to set up the to_param method in the model os the longer URL — with the handle attached, is the default.

This doesn’t work (not that I really expected it to):

  def to_param
    "#{id}/#{handle}" 
  end

I get a No route matches {:action=>"edit", :controller=>"articles", error. I also tried just using the handle, but then Rails generates links to the resource just using the handle and not the ID. I know I can do it with a – in stead of a /, but I prefer the /. Any way to make this work? If I have to add some extra paremeters to my link_to helpers, that’s okay.

Answer 1

Did you try to pass a Hash to link_to?

link_to "Link", {:id => @article.id, :handle => @article.handle}

Update

You have to modify your routes:

match '/articles/:id/:handle', :to => 'articles#show', :as => :article_with_handle

and use the following helper to generate the link:

link_to "Link", article_with_handle_path(:id => @article.id, :handle => @article.handle)

You can override the helper to simplify things:

def article_with_handle_path(article)
  super(:id => article.id, :handle => article.handle)
end

and use it like this:

link_to "Link", article_with_handle_path(@article)