Question

Is there a way to override rails route helper methods so that they handle model instances differently? I just finished creating a User model that does not inherit from ActiveRecord::Base, but instead uses methods that I wrote to retrieve users from an LDAP database. However, now all the route helper methods are messed up. (For example, user_path(user) gives /users/#<User:0x3df82a0> instead of /users/002131)

I tried overriding the method with the following code (placed inside of the User model) but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Any ideas?

class << Rails.application.routes.url_helpers
  def user_path(user)
    if user.class == User
      users_path + "/#{user.id}"
    else
      users_path + "/#{user}"
    end
  end
end

Answer 1

Implement a to_param method on your model and when you pass that to a route helper it should call that method.

An example: most of the time you route by a Model ID, so a call like

user_path(some_user)

generates a URL like /users/45

But lets say you have a unique username that you want to use in the route, so you would just do:

class User
  def to_param
    username
  end
end

Then a call to user_path(user) would generate something like: /users/blackbear