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.
Related
The old sitemap of my application has already been indexed to Google now. For some one visiting my rails app with old url shouldn't go to 404.
The old url looked like this
/search?sub_category=210
Now after making them friendly, it looks like this:
/search?sub_category=milling-and-drilling.
I tried redirecting it from controller but it causes too much issues on other things. Such as filters which are using the same params. Is there a way I can do it from routes file?
Instead of using redirect_to route_path(id) you would do redirect_to route_path(object.find_by_id(id).name)
How to redirect old url to new url in rails using just routes?
AFAIK (As far as I know), no. (if through params)
The main job of routes.rb is to determine what "code" will handle the request, particularly that which matches request.url and the request.method. It does not concern yet of the request parameters nor its values: these would be handled in the controllers itself. Although, you can route based on parameters (or any information about the "request") through a routes constraint
Alternative Solution:
Instead of finding by ID, now find by "Slug name or ID".
In your models, particularly in this specific example of yours, add something like:
class SubCategory < ApplicationRecord
# if you're using a gem for the "friendly" urls, you don't need this method, and just use theirs.
def self.friendly_find!(friendly_id)
# this may not necessarily be `name`, maybe `slug`? or depending on your case
find_by(name: friendly_id) || find(friendly_id)
end
end
And in your controllers, just replace wherever you're finding a record (maybe also to other models not just SubCategory as needed be), particularly in your search action:
def search
sub_category = SubCategory.friendly_find!(params[:sub_category])
end
NOTE: friendly_find! will raise an Error if no record is found.
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'
How do I route to a page that ends with an id?
E.G.
before: site.com/messages/8
after: site.com/messages/terrytibbs
I've tried:
match "/messages/:username" => "messages#id"
No luck so far. Just trying to make the url have a little more meaning by replacing the number with the username of the user the current user is talking to.
Kind regards
If you want something simple without having to change your routes etc, why not do this:
class Message
def to_param
"#{id}-{username}"
end
...
end
Assuming you have a username attribute on your message. That will make your url look like:
site.com/messages/8-terrytibbs
this works because of the following (say in irb):
"8-terrytibbs".to_i
=> 8
and when rails looks up your message in your controller it will do the same thing to the id parameter.
EDIT: there is an excellent railscast on this here: http://railscasts.com/episodes/63-model-name-in-url and an updated version here: http://railscasts.com/episodes/63-model-name-in-url-revised
Take a look at friendly_id gem. I think it's what you need.
FriendlyId is the "Swiss Army bulldozer" of slugging and permalink plugins for Ruby on Rails. It allows you to create pretty URLs and work with human-friendly strings as if they were numeric ids for Active Record models.
Using FriendlyId, it's easy to make your application use URLs like:
http://example.com/states/washington
instead of:
http://example.com/states/4323454
Your route is set up correctly you have to change the Controller to use the correct parameters.
Assuming your MessagesController does:
def id
User.find(params[:id])
end
change to:
def id
User.find_by_username(params[:username])
end
I would also recommend adding indexing on user name.
You're on the right track, you just need to make sure the route is pointing at a proper action on the controller, like so:
Say the action you want this to point to is named show, here is how you would define the route:
match 'messages/:username' => 'messages#show'
Then if you navigate to messages/8, params[:username] will be set to '8' (parameters always come in as String's.
Likewise if you navigate to messages/terrytibbs, params[:username] will be set to 'terrytibbs'.
Try reading Chapter 3-3.5 of the Rails Routing Guide, it provides a good overview of how to bind parameters to a route like you are attempting to do.
Assume the following paths to be legitimate and resolving:
http://test.local/wizards/home
http://test.local/wizards/wizardfest2012/dates
http://test.local/dragons/
http://test.local/dragons/blog/stop-slaying-us
http://test.local/
This is (if you couldn't tell) for a CMS that includes a blog, so the slugs would be generated by the user. I have some routes to process first for reserved namespaces (admin, for example).
I assume that the user generated routes need to be routed to a Page controller - but, I don't think pragmatically adding a line to routes.rb is efficient. My question then, is how do I process the first part of the params (in this case, wizards and dragons) to get the correct information from the model?
Here's one of my ideas - split (somehow) the first part of the slug (again, wizards and dragons and pass the rest of the slug (for example, /wizardfest2012/dates) to the model to fetch the associated content.
Any thoughts on the most efficient way to do this?
I am not sure whether I understand what you want to achieve, but maybe this is what you want:
constraints :camp => /wizards|dragons/ do
match ':camp/home' => "pages#home"
match ':camp/blog/:title' => "pages#blog"
# ...and all the routes with known components
match ':camp/*other' => "pages#other"
end
You may create a before_filter which will recognize the params[:camp] and prepare the necessary models or whatever is needed.
The other action will receive the string "wizardfest2012/dates" as params[:other]. I hope that it was what you needed.
The "Rails Routing from the Outside In" guide may be worth reading, unless you have already read it.
My application is in RoR
I have an action/view called showsummary where the ID has been passed into the URL, and the controller has used that to instantiate #vendor where #vendor.name is the name of a company.
I would like the URL to be, rather than showsummary/1/ to have /vendor-name in the URL instead.
How do I do that?
All of these solutions use find_by_name, which would definitely require having an index on that column and require they are unique. A better solution that we have used, sacrificing a small amount of beauty, is to use prefix the vendor name with its ID. This means that you dont have to have an index on your name column and/or require uniqueness.
vendor.rb
def to_param
normalized_name = name.gsub(' ', '-').gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9\_\-\.]/, '')
"#{self.id}-#{normalized_name}"
end
So this would give you URLs like
/1-Acme
/19-Safeway
etc
Then in your show action you can still use
Vendor.find(params[:id])
as that method will implicitly call .to_i on its argument, and calling to_i on such a string will always return the numerical prefix and drop the remaining text- its all fluff at that point.
The above assumes you are using the default route of /:controller/:action/:id, which would make your URLs look like
/vendors/show/1-Acme
But if you want them to just look
/1-Acme
Then have a route like
map.show_vendor '/:id', :controller => 'vendors', :action => 'show'
This would imply that that it would pretty much swallow alot of URLs that you probably wouldnt want it too. Take warning.
I thought I'd mention String#parameterize, as a supplement to the tagged answer.
def to_param
"#{id}-#{name.parameterize}"
end
It'll filter out hyphenated characters, replace spaces with dashes etc.
Ryan Bates has a great screencast on this very subject.
Basically you overload the to_param method in the Vendor model.
def to_param
permalink
end
Then when you look up the resource in your controller you do something like this:
#vender = Vender.find_by_name(params[:id])
But the problem with this is that you'll have to make sure that the vendors' names are unique. If they can't be then do the other solution that Ryan suggests where he prepends the the id to the name and then parses the resulting uri to find the item id.
You do this by modifying the routes that are used to access those URL's and changing them to use :name, rather than :id. This will probably mean that you have to write the routes yourself rather than relying on resources.
For instance add this to the routes.rb file:
map.with_options :controller => "vendor" do |vendor|
vendor.connect "/vendor/:name", :action => "show"
# more routes here for update, delete, new, etc as required
end
The other change that will be required is that now you'll have to find the vendor object in the database by the name not the id, so:
#vendor = Vendor.find_by_name(params[:name])
Internally (at least to my knowledge/experimentation) whatever parameter name is not specified in the URL part of the route (i.e. not within the "/Controller/Action/:id" part of it) is tacked on to the end as a parameter.
Friendly ID
http://github.com/norman/friendly_id/blob/26b373414eba639a773e61ac595bb9c1424f6c0b/README.rdoc
I'd have to experiment a bit to get it right, but there's two primary parts to the solution.
1) Add a route.
in config/routes, add a line that sends requests of the form baseurl/controller/:vendor-name to the action showsummary, (or maybe a new action, show_summary_by_vendor_name)
[also, if you planned on using baseurl/:vendorname, that's fine too]
For convenience, make sure the parameter is something like :vendor-name, not the default :id
2) Write the controller action.
In the controller file, either edit your showsummary action to differentiate based on whether it's called with an id or with a vendorname, or just write a show_summary_by_vendor_name. (depending on best practices, and what route you wrote in 1. I don't know off the top of my head which is preferable)
You can then do
#vendor = Vendors.find_by_name(params[:vendor_name])
or something like that, and then render it the way you would in regular showsummary.
3) Use that as the link.
Once you confirm that baseurl[/controller?]/vendor-name works, and shows the summary, make sure all the links in your application, and elsewhere, use that link. Off the top of my head, I can't remember how difficult it is to integrate a custom route into link_to, but I think it's doable. Most search engines [google] rely heavily on links, so good SEO will have you using those named links, not the numbered ones. I think. I don't know much about SEO.
Take a look also at this quck start to SEO for Rails