Question

Trying to integrate some friendly_id gem functionality on a controller method.

Essentially, I have a Market object, which has its URL created based on a custom method. Since it’s based on a custom method, friendly_id won’t update the URL when the Market object gets updated. Friendly_id does offer a redo_slugs rake task, but when I call it from within my controller, it tells me that it can’t build the task. Running the command outside works just fine.

The code for my controller looks like this:

require 'rake'
require 'friendly_id'

class Admin::MarketsController < ApplicationController
  def update
    if @market.update_attributes(params[:market])
      rake_market_slugs
    end
  end

  protected
    def rake_market_slugs
      Rake::Task["friendly_id:redo_slugs MODEL=Market"].invoke
    end
end

Am I missing something? Or can I just not do this inside my controller?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Calling a rake task from a controller to update a model object is terrible. Looking at the code for that rake task, you can see that redo_slugs is simply running the delete_slugs and make_slugs tasks. So there’s another reason not to do this. You’ll be generating slugs for every Market in your table, instead of just the one that you need.

If you look at the code for make_slugs you can see that there’s no magic there. All it does is load your model objects in blocks of 100 and then save them.

So, that would be the first thing I would try. Simply reload and save your model. After that, I’d need to see some logs to dig deeper.