In my rails application, for some reason, I have to redirect my URL in to desired URL.
This is how my config setting the routes.rb.
map.connect 'sample/:action/:id.:format', :controller => 'test'
It redirects well when the url is http://example.com/sample. It goes Test controller index method.
When the url is http://example.com/sample/displayname?id=10, it goes to Test controller and searches for displayname method. Obviously it wasn't there, so I got the "undefined" error message.Here I want even though the URL is (http://example.com/sample/displayname?id=10) it quite enough to go Test controller's index method.
Also in the Address Bar I want to URL masking . If I hit http://example.com/sample/ it should redirect & in address Bar http://example.com/test.
How can i do this with Rails-2 application (Rails version 2.3.9)?
First, I don't recommend doing this. It's going against the conventions of how things are done in rails, and that tends to lead to pain.
(As for what I do recommend? Just structure your urls differently. If you do things the way rails makes easy, then you'll have fun using it. Otherwise, your life will be full of pain and suffering.)
BUT, if you really want to, it looks like you can't do regular expression routes in rails. I thought you could, but I see no signs that you can. What you can do, however, is...
def method_missing
index
end
Put that in the controller you want to have this behavior. It'll do what you want, but it also might hide other errors. In any case, don't say I didn't warn you. This seems like a bad idea...
As for the redirect, a before_filter in the test controller will do that.
before_filter :redirect_if_wrong_path
def redirect_if_wrong_path
if request.path =~ /\/sample/
redirect_to request.path.sub('/sample', '/test')
end
end
Related
I just realized I had a very hard to find bug on my website. I frequently use Model.find to retrieve data from my database.
A year ago I merged three websites causing a lot of redirections that needed to be handled. To do I created a "catch all"-functionality in my application controller as this:
around_filter :catch_not_found
def catch_not_found
yield
rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
require 'functions/redirections'
handle_redirection(request.path)
end
in addition I have this at the bottom of my routes.rb:
match '*not_found_path', :to => 'redirections#not_found_catcher', via: :get, as: :redirect_catcher, :constraints => lambda{|req| req.path !~ /\.(png|gif|jpg|txt|js|css)$/ }
Redirection-controller has:
def not_found_catcher
handle_redirection(request.path)
end
I am not sure these things are relevant in this question but I guess it is better to tell.
My actual problem
I frequently use Model.find to retrieve data from my database. Let's say I have a Product-model with a controller like this:
def show
#product = Product.find(params[:id])
#product.country = Country.find(...some id that does not exist...)
end
# View
<%= #product.country.name %>
This is something I use in some 700+ places in my application. What I realized today was that even though the Product model will be found. Calling the Country.find() and NOT find something causes a RecordNotFound, which in turn causes a 404 error.
I have made my app around the expectation that #product.country = nil if it couldn't find that Country in the .find-search. I know now that is not the case - it will create a RecordNotFound. Basically, if I load the Product#show I will get a 404-page where I would expect to get a 500-error (since #product.country = nil and nil.name should not work).
My question
My big question now. Am I doing things wrong in my app, should I always use Model.find_by_id for queries like my Country.find(...some id...)? What is the best practise here?
Or, does the problem lie within my catch all in the Application Controller?
To answer your questions:
should I always use Model.find_by_id
If you want to find by an id, use Country.find(...some id...). If you want to find be something else, use eg. Country.find_by(name: 'Australia'). The find_by_name syntax is no longer favoured in Rails 4.
But that's an aside, and is not your problem.
Or, does the problem lie within my catch all in the Application Controller?
Yeah, that sounds like a recipe for pain to me. I'm not sure what specifically you're doing or what the nature of your redirections is, but based on the vague sense I get of what you're trying to do, here's how I'd approach it:
Your Rails app shouldn't be responsible for redirecting routes from your previous websites / applications. That should be the responsibility of your webserver (eg nginx or apache or whatever).
Essentially you want to make a big fat list of all the URLs you want to redirect FROM, and where you want to redirect them TO, and then format them in the way your webserver expects, and configure your webserver to do the redirects for you. Search for eg "301 redirect nginx" or "301 redirect apache" to find out info on how to set that up.
If you've got a lot of URLs to redirect, you'll likely want to generate the list with code (most of the logic should already be there in your handle_redirection(request.path) method).
Once you've run that code and generated the list, you can throw that code away, your webserver will be handling the redirects form the old sites, and your rails app can happily go on with no knowledge of the previous sites / URLs, and no dangerous catch-all logic in your application controller.
That is a very interesting way to handle exceptions...
In Rails you use rescue_from to handle exceptions on the controller layer:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
rescue_from SomeError, with: :oh_noes
private def oh_noes
render text: 'Oh no.'
end
end
However Rails already handles some exceptions by serving static html pages (among them ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound). Which you can override with dynamic handlers.
However as #joshua.paling already pointed out you should be handling the redirects on the server level instead of in your application.
I have been programming in Ruby on Rails for a while now, but never really dug deep into routing until recently. After reading a fair amount of documentation and googling, I haven't been able to answer this question.
How do you change a URL after a route is matched? To better explain this, let me set a scenario I'm trying to solve. The root of my website while testing is localhost:3000. My login page is localhost:3000/login. Once logged in though, I want the URL to read localhost:3000 again with no extension. The actual page name is dashboard and my route is as follows currently.
get 'dashboard' => 'user#dashboard'
This only matches when the URL is localhost:3000/dashboard, but I wan't to have cleaner URL like a lot of sites have. How is this achieved with Ruby On Rails? I want to avoid a javascript solutions or anything that is a workaround.
Any help or tips is greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.
I've provided the solution below, but I agree with max that your wanting to make a RESTful URL less meaningful is backwards. You should strive to alias a URL to make it more meaningful (e.g. from site.com/posts/34239482069472/ to site.com/posts/my-post-title).
The URL that appears in the address bar is an instruction to an app. When a user puts "site.com/dashboard" into the address bar, they're instructing the app to make an HTTP request get 'dashboard'. The Controller#action is a set of instructions the app executes when it receives that request. If you're following Rails naming convention then Users#dashboard will retrieve data and then by default render the view template at views/users/dashboard.html.erb. Understand this: you're not changing the URL for a given view, you're changing which view template is rendered by the Controller#action that is set for that url.
This means the Controller#action for your root_url (i.e. your root to: 'controller#action' in config/routes.rb) should render one view template if user is logged in and a different view template if a user is not logged in. Assuming root to: welcome#index, your controller action would look something like this:
app/controllers/welcome_controller.rb
def index
# db queries, logic, set #variables
if session[:user_id]
render "users/dashboard" # app/views/users/dashboard.html.erb
else
render "index" # app/views/welcome/index.html.erb
end
end
Note that if the view template you want to render corresponds to the controller, e.g. users_controller.rb action is rendering a view in views/users, then you only need to give the view name, otherwise you need to give a path (relative to app/views).
Why? /dashboard is a proper RESTful definition of a resource. In REST a route should have the same response independent of state. So having a radically different root page for a logged in user violates REST.
Also your users may want to access the index page as well the dashboard and you would be denying them that possibility.
These kind of URL micro-optimizations do not warrant hacking a bunch of state into your routes definitions.
I want to have a rails route that triggers if the given id is present, but falls back to further route matching if not.
Specifically, I want to have promo codes at the root level of my site. So, you can go to foo.com/save87 or foo.com/xmasspecial, and it'll treat it as a promo code, but if you go to a promo code that's not there (foo.com/badcode), that route will not match and rails will continue down the route list.
In an ideal world, I'd do something like this in my routes.rb file:
get '/:promo_id' => 'promos#show, constraints => lambda { Promo.exists?(promo_id) }
I know that the above code, without the constraints, would work as a catch-all for foo.com/*, and would sorta work if I put it as the last line in the routes file. Unfortunately, that would result in foo.com/badcode a 'promocode not found' error, rather than a normal 'route not found' error.
So, is there a way to accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish? This is in Rails 3, for reference.
Edit: To clarify a bit-
I want a wildcard url as described above so that our promocode urls are short and memorable (foo.com/save87 instead of foo.com/promo_codes/save87)
I'd prefer to have the option of having other routes after this one. I may, at some point, need another wildcard url at the root level- for example, if I want vanity urls for another resource in my system. For example, if I sell a dozen varieties of widgets, I might want foo.com/widget_deluxe, foo.com/widget_extreme, etc in addition to my promo code urls. I'd have to make sure that there's no collision between promo codes and widget varieties, but that's easily handled elsewhere.
In an ideal world, I'd do something like this in my routes.rb file:
No way. In Rails World, this functionality should go inside controller.
In controller you can do something like
def show
if Promo.exists?(promo_id)
#do something
else
raise ActionController::RoutingError.new('Not Found')
end
end
Update
With routes, you can do something like this
constraints(lambda { |req| Promo.exists?(req.params["promo_id"]) }) do
get '/:promo_id' => 'promos#show
end
Please keep in mind that this constraints will query the database for every request with a url matching the pattern /:promo_id (e.q. /users, /faq). To avoid unnecessary database queries that decrease your website performance, you should add this rule as far as possible to the end of your routes.rb.
Using this routing logic, every request to your application would do an extra search for a promo code before it moved on to the rest of the routes. I recommend looking at your business case and consider doing a Promo controller. If you must do routes, something like this would work but I would put it at the end so that it goes to your regular routes first.
get '*', to: 'promos#show'
Sorry, I thought I understood this, but now I have to re-evaluate my understanding of routes.rb. Hoping you could help.
A browser request goes to the Application Controller and the Controller tells what to show, right? - what erb file, database stuff, whatever...
In my routes.rb file I have:
root :to => 'static_pages#FAQ'
Until lately I thought what was happening was: routes.rb is looking at my static_pages_controller.rb file, looking at the FAQ method, and then seeing what to do. If there's nothing in the FAQ method - as is the case - then Rails does its magic and goes to my FAQ.html.erb in my View, the closest thing.
But even if I change the name of:
def FAQ
end
in my controller, or delete the static_pages_controller.rb altogether, it still goes to my FAQ.html.erb file. So does routes.rb not even look at controllers? Does it go straight to 'View' files? Thanks for any help.
static page are served first so that is why FAQ.html.erb is always served.
Also "A browser request goes to the Application Controller and the Controller tells what to show, right? - what erb file, database stuff, whatever..."
I think of it this way: The request first goes through routing, then to the controller for the resource in question, the controller being inherited from application_controller, will then query the model as needed, calculating variables as needed which it then uses in comiling the View page, which are compilation, gets sent as HTML.
Your ideas are essentially correct; Rails will attempt to render the static_page's controller's FAQ method, which implicitly renders the "FAQ" view, if no view (or other output) is explicitly rendered by the action.
What you're missing is that Rails will fill in the blanks if any one of the controller/action pieces is missing. All you need to do is define the view and Rails will assume that you're simply not bothering to define an empty action.
Starting a method name with a capital letter seems like a very bad idea in ruby, because ruby will treat any identifiers that start with a capital letter as a constant. The very first thing I would do personally is change 'FAQ' to 'faq' in my routes and controller code. If you really want to have 'FAQ' capitalized in the browser url, you can probably accomplish that via something like:
root :to => static_pages#faq, :as => 'FAQ'
To check that your method is getting called, use the logger:
def faq
Rails.logger.warn "faq method did get called after all"
end
I am trying to do something for hours and I'm stuck with rails routes.
So.. the idea is to have some even more user-friendly urls like for example /Laptops for a category and /Laptops/Apple-MacBook-Air-and-so-on. I should also use such links for simple pages like /MyDummyPage etc.
So my idea was to get the request_url and check if i can find the page myself. But it seems rails is initialising this request class after defining routes and right before calling the controller.
As you can see I am stuck and can't see any possible solution for my problem.
I will be glad if someone can help me.
Thank you in advance.
All the best!
(Whole thing revised)
If you want to allow dynamic matches along with normal restful routes, there are a couple options- (put it at the end of your routes or it will match everything)
match '*raw' => 'dynamic#show'
And in dynamic_controller.rb
def show
parts = params[:raw].split '/'
# do logic here to set all variables used in views
render #resource_or_page
end
You could also use the input in a search function and redirect to the first result of that search. Or return a 404 if there are no results.
def show
results = search_method_here params[:raw].sub('/', ' ')
if results.any?
redirect_to results.first
else
raise ActionController::RoutingError.new 'Not Found'
end
end
Also, for freindlier urls within restful routes, try out this: https://github.com/norman/friendly_id
I think its important to realize that people generally do not manipulate URLs by hand, and its nice to have readable urls, but its more important for them to be clear on what/where they are doing/going.
In response to your comment, I think you are mislead about routing. If you make 2 routes :category and :page, they match the exact same url, except one of them stores it in params[:category] and the other in params[:page]. To differentiate it, you would need to have a different amount of arguments matched like :category/:product or a namespace, or, perhaps, a restful route which specifies the MVC the route routes to.