Question

Simple enough. When were making a typical restful rails app we would keep all routes inside of our applicaiton. Very rarely would a path link to an external path. But if we were to do it, I’m wondering what the best way is.

A typical matching of home

match "home"=>"appcontroller#home"

If we were matching an external url to a variable of path. We might do something like the below?

First method

Routes.rb

match "external"=>"http:/www.google.ie"

Then in our html.erb

<%= link_to 'Google', external_path %>

Note this is not actually a legal way of doing things but something similar may exist. It seems very close to the current way of defining paths in rails but with an external landing.

Second method

Something that I’ve seen done elsewhere is to create a global variable for the external URL and use it in the link. EG.
in environment.rb or production.rb or whatever

@ext_path="http:/www.google.ie"

Then in our html.erb

<%= link_to 'Google', @ext_path %>

---

So to recap. Whats the best way to use external URLS in rails. Paths? Variables? Other?
Any input appreciated

Answer 1

I would have kept external links only in views. Because this links are not related to the any kind of logic of the application, and it’s just an UI elements.

So, this way seems to me the best:

<%= link_to 'Google', "http://google.ie" %>

If you need to use this element many times, maybe it makes sense to bring this code into the helper, for example:

def search_engine_link
  link_to 'Google', "http://google.ie"
end

And I really think that is’s not very good place to introduce a more complex logic.