Question

In my Rails app I have a user model (Devise) with url_field for Twitter.

Right now I have this in my show page:

<%= link_to @deal.user.company_twitter, @deal.user.company_twitter, :class => "comp_twitter" %>

It shows the entire link in the show page (even http://), that’s because my url_field makes the user add “http://” or it won’t validate the link.

I want the user to only add their “@name” instead of the whole Twitter link when creating their profile. I would also want to show only the @name instead of the Twitter link in the “show” page. How can I do this?

Answer 1

Simply don’t use an url_field, but a regular string database field, like twitter_username. When signing up, let the user enter their username, e.g. foo.

For getting the real URL to the Twitter account, create a new method in your user.rb model:

def twitter_url
  "http://twitter.com/#{self.twitter_username}"
end

The advantage is that at this point, in your model, you can include a custom validation that would check if this URL really exists after the user has submitted their twitter_username.

Finally, use that in your view instead of just the URL:

<%= link_to "@#{@user.twitter_username}", @user.twitter_url %>

This would render:

<a href="http://twitter.com/foo">@foo</a>