Question

Is is possible to create a recursive route in Rails?

I have an application, which allows a admin to create pages. The page model is a nested set and so each page has a parent_id hence the pages are structured in trees. The page model also uses the Friendly ID plugin to provide slugs for each page.

When a user browses the site I would like them to see the nesting structure in the urls – its better for search engine purposes as well as any users who might like to browse the site by chopping the urls.

I want something along the lines of:

http://example.com/page/page/page/page …etc

Now obviously I can create a nested map with say 10 nests and hope that no site exceeds that limit, but I’m curious if there is another way…

Answer 1

You can map the initial route (/page) to the controller, setting up “globbing” for all the trailing parameters.

map.connect '/:page/*pages', :controller => 'pages', :action => 'show' 

params[:pages] will now contain an array of the page parameters (matching as many trailing params as you specify in the URL).