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Asked: 2026-06-02T03:51:34+00:00

Using Rails 3.1.1 and the gem acts_as_tree. I have googled the issue and checked

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Using Rails 3.1.1 and the gem acts_as_tree. I have googled the issue and checked similar questions here at SO (the answers are too old, or irrelevant).

I have a model called articles with a route that today looks like:

  resources :articles, :path => '', :only => :show 
  resources :articles, :path => 'articles', :except => :show

I have three articles: “book”, “chapter1” and “chapter2”. Where book is parent to chapter1 and chapter2.

Today, my path to each article is: host.com/book, host.com/chapter1 and host.com/chapter2. I want the url path to be host.com/book/chapter1 and host.com/book/chapter2 , i.e. nested routes.

How can I create this in a clean simple manner?

Basically, I want a path that will be host.com/:parent_id/:parent_id/:id with N numbers of :parent_id. Pretty much how WordPress-articles are routed.

I don’t believe route globbers is the solution, but I might be wrong. It seems to give the same result for host.com/:id and host.com/foo/bar/:id which will result in duplicate content.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A)

    If you have a solution for the routing and the only problem with it is that you’re concerned about duplicate content issues, you could consider adding <link rel="canonical" href="..."> to the pages generated from those requests. It’s not bulletproof though, as Google considers it a suggestion.

    Not sure if the route globbers solution would take care of generating the URLs with parent IDs though.

    B)

    You don’t need the parent IDs to perform the routing, correct? You just want to include them in the URLs and route those requests the same as if using the URLs like example.com/chapter1, correct?

    If you’d consider a solution that’s not purely at the Rails level, what about rewriting the URLs on those requests so that /:parent_id/:parent_id/:id becomes /:id before Rails processes it? That would be easier if there was a static prefix, like /articles/:parent_id/:parent_id/:id.

    I imagine you’d need to write some helpers to generate the URLs with parent IDs for linking to those resources.

    Duplicate Content

    Either way, you’ll need to generate URLs that include the parent IDs, so duplicate content issues probably aren’t too likely if you only link to those resources using those URLs.

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