I'm planning to port our current cms (written in PHP) to Rails. All parts do well, except for one: routing.
Like most cms systems, the routing in our cms based on a database with pages, which are linked to modules, controllers and actions. On this approach a user can fully customize or specify it's own urls.
I know that Rails (and most (application) frameworks have the approach of defining routes in a file, but I hope this is possible.
The approach our users should have is:
add new page
select type (news, form, product, ...)
select an item (select which form, blog or product should be displayed)
enter a url for that page
Special the last point (4) is important. A user should be able to add form A to /contact-us, and form B to /clients/register-as-new-client e.g.
On a request the router needs to do a database query with the page url, to find out which controller, task and parameters should be dispatched.
Question has been updated, and i don't think this is a valid answer anymore
we have a similar paging system. we use a routing glob. in routes.rb:
get 'pages/*lookup_path', to: 'pages#show', defaults: { format: 'html' }, as: 'page'
Just parse params[:lookup_path] in PagesController to suit your needs
'http://localhost/pages/users/'
params[:lookup_path] #=> users/
'http://localhost/pages/users/23'
params[:lookup_path] #=> users/23
'http://localhost/pages/people/1'
params[:lookup_path] #=> people/1
Although this solution isn't ReSTful, I think this should solve the issue.
Regardless, Rails uses routes in a file. You cannot change this since the framework heralds "convention over configiuration". All I can do is point you in a direction to minimize this.
There is a catchall route in Rails (on RailsCasts, and on StackOverflow) which you can use to direct all routing to one controller action. You may further customize the routing behaviour in that method
You could also make a route like…
:controller/:action => Controller::Action
…as is done in CodeIgniter, but now your methods have to have names like contact-us and register-as-a-new-client.
Related
I just started deploying a Rails website. In fact, I started programming on Rails 2 days ago.
I've created a new project, added some gems, etc. Everything is working properly, and I have some basic knowledge on how all works.
The thing is that what I want to create is a simple website with some sections (let's say, News, Contact, About, Products...). All this content is kinda static.
But I came in a problem. I don't really know what to do in order to create them. What I want, for example, is something like mypage.com/products/fashionableproduct, mypage.com/about, etc, or even mypage.com/page/products.
I thought about creating a Controller, then an action for each page... afterwards, I came up with other solution: scaffolding. Creating a resource called page, that has a title, etc...
I'm really a beginner on this topic, and I would like to hear your helpful voice.
Thanks!
Check out https://github.com/thoughtbot/high_voltage for static pages for Rails.
And check out http://railscasts.com/episodes/30-pretty-page-title for setting page titles.
The paths to your files are determined by your routes. The configuration file for routes is located at config/routes.rb. You can match a URL path, and then point to a given resource. More information about routes here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html
If you generate a controller, you can process any dynamic data and then pass this data to these "kinda static" pages. Here is an example configuration that would match the path "mypage.com/about" and display the appropriate page:
# config/routes.rb
match "/about" => "example_controller#about"
# app/controllers/example_controller.rb
class ExampleController < ApplicationController
def about
# calculations
end
end
# app/views/example/about.html.erb
<!-- This is your HTML page -->
I think the title of your post might be a bit misleading. I have the feeling you don't want static pages but some database stored content. Just like Ben Simpson tells you to do, create a normal pages controller and make it work.
In the end you might want to customize some routes to get them to be exactly the way you want as in your examples.
Since you just started the app, I strongly recommend you start over and make a new app with Rails 3.1 which is the most current version and learn how to do the basics through http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ and a few other sources such as http://railscasts.com.
You will then learn Rails the right way from the beginning. Good luck and have fun in the process.
I am trying to find a best-practice to allow users to define the route to their pages in Rails, by writing them in a text field when submitting posts, like with the Path module in Drupal (yes, we are porting a Drupal site to Rails)
So, I need to
define a new, named route on article submission (eg http://www.domain.com/a-day-in-annas-life)
change the existing route on article edit, if they define a new one, by doing a 301 redirect from the old route to the new one
How can I best achieve this?
Okay, I found a way, but if it's best practice or not, I cant say.
I am using custom restrictor's like this:
class CharitiesRestrictor
def self.matches?(request)
slug = request.path_parameters[:path]
!Charity.find_by_name(slug).nil?
end
end
constraints CharitiesRestrictor do
match '*path' => 'charities#show_by_slug', :constraints => CharitiesRestrictor.new
end
When I create a block like this for each of my model/controller pairs that should be able to respond to permalinks, I can have them all have a chance to act on a permalink. However, this also means that they all get called in series, which is not necessarily ideal.
How do I efficiently enable root-level routing with Ruby on Rails?
For example, instead of having:
/questions/a-question-here
I want:
/a-question-here
What technology would I use, and how would I configure the routing to enable this?
EDIT: I also have other models such as videos and users, so I'd like the routing to match other controllers as well. For example, how do I get /username to go to some action in the Users controller and /some-video-title to go to some action in the Videos controller?
Thanks for all your help, people.
Rails has a very configurable routing layer built in. Good documentation here:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html
Your route could end up looking something like this:
match ":id" => "questions#show"
Depending on where you put that, it could override a lot of other routes, so be aware of that.
I'd like to implement a special routing in rails based on the URI (I'm using rails 3.0.4 with Mongoid and devise). Let's say my user logins, once signin I want to redirect him to a private area for example http://www.mysite.com/site1. Many users could belong to site1, many to site2... users of one site are not authorized to see another site. Today the redirection is fine after sign in, but I'm confused on how I should implement siteX (each site has its own data). I have the following route:
match '/:site_name' => 'site#index', :constraints => { :site_name => /'a pattern'/ }
resources :sites do
end
Because I need to stick to this URI format should I nest all my other resources inside :sites? For example if I want to display order 1 of site 2 the URL should look like http://www.mysite.com/site2/order/1. I can't put the resource's name "sites" in the URI as it starts directly with the identifier. Is there another way of doing this, what would be the best pratices? Hope my explanations make sense.
Thanks a lot for all your help!
Ted
I recommend you scrap the idea of "subdirectories". You'll have (not insurmountable) difficulties with link_to and the other helpers.
I would setup subdomains (a la, site1.mysite.com) if that's possible for your situation
Doing url.com/site_name is kind of nuts.
If only one user can belong to a site, take it from the user perspective then and use resource and not resources.
E.g., url.com/orders would be all current_user.orders, since current_user has_one site (or is a member of one site).
If you need site specific navigation, then draw from /site_name for site specific detail that is public in nature. E.g., url.com/site_name/pricing
If you really want to break your site down into /site_name specific routes, then through that into a subdomain. You can even try using sudomain devise to get you started.
I'm building an article/blog website where any article may show up within a series of URL paths.
/section/article
/section/page/article
/section/page/page2/article
This works, but what if I wanted to have the page number for that article (/page/123) be bound to those URLs
/section/article/page/123/
/section/page/article/page/123
/section/page/page2/article/page/123
This would mean that I would have to create a specific route for each different url?
/:section/:page/:sub_page/:article/page/:page
This would mean that I would create dozens of URL routing paramters.
Is there anyway in rails to say that all urls may have a /page/NUMBER suffix at the end of the URL and still route normally (that is assign the NUMBER to a parameter and continue to goto the page normally)?
Route globbing, described at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#route-globbing, might work in this situation. For example, your route might read map.connect '/:section/*page_subpage_path/page/:number', :controller => 'articles', :action => 'show'
This exact code might not work as intended, but this method might be a good direction to try. Good luck :)
If you want to create routes that are as customized as that you normally need to create a large number of routes to accommodate them. The general format is /resource/:id when using map.resource, anything other than that is left to you to specify.
Given that the Rails routes.rb file is executable ruby you can often define your routes programmatically by repeating patterns or doing combinations on arrays if required.