Question

This is likely something easy to accomplish, but I’m having difficulty even articulating clearly, leading me to get all sorts of semi-germaine, but not quite what I’m after posts on SO when searching.

I have a resource, we’ll just use User as a simple to discuss use case. I desire SEO friendly URLs, so instead of ~/users/:id, we have ~/users/:name, where the show action on my users controllers is doing a User.find_by_name(:name). Works great.

In various parts of the app, I want to redirect the end user back to my resource. The docs seem to indicate I should do

redirect_to @user, :notice => "your page is now DIAMONDS!"'

The problem here is that this automatically appears to use the :id value of the resource, which isn’t what I’m after. I’m wondering if there’s a way to just define a route in my routes file which is aware of my desire to use the name property–and then just redirect to the generated route_url helper. But I’m at a loss for how to do that.

In the interim, I’m resorting to this:

flash[:notice]    = "Your account is now DIAMONDS.  *fist bump*"
redirect_to :action => :show , :id => @user.name

This is less than ideal to me as it’s a good bit of repeated code (I have lots of UI elements that will be linking back to my resource) and because I can’t seem to figure out how to include the flash as part of the redirect_to method call—every combo of curly bracing w/in the redirect_to that includes a flash bombs on me.

I don’t think it’s germaine to my problem specifically, but I am doing this on Rails 3 in case it does have some implication in terms of options available to me.

Sorry for the noobishness 🙂

Answer 1

Pretty simple to do. The standardish way of doing this is:

/app/models/user.rb

def to_param
  "#{id}-#{name}"
end

That’s nice, and gives you nicer SEO — http://yoursite.com/users/1345-supercool …. You can tweak it a bit to remove the ‘1345’:

/app/models/user.rb

  # add_column :permalink, :string
  attr_protected :permalink
  before_create :set_permalink
  validates_uniqueness_of :permalink

  def set_permalink
    self.permalink = username.parameterize
  end

  def to_param
    permalink
  end

This will give you http://yoursite.com/users/supercool and will be a permanent URL, so that if the user changes their username later, the URL will stay the same and keep search engines happy.