#314 Pretty URLs with FriendlyId

Very interesting idea. I can see this being useful on user models with an email address or user name. Does friendly_id assume the name column is unique?

Somebody knows if this is also compatible with CouchRest Model? (Couchdb)

I often use FriendlyId in combination with a UUID column. This way, the guessing of further resources is much harder (cp. /foo/1 → /foo/2 with random, 32-digit identifiers). Of course you will still need a authorization mechanism...

Ryan,

You forgot to add

gem install friendly_id in the web notes

Is friendly_id SEO friendly?

I read link about rails-sexy-url for SEO.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/rails-seo-tips.htm#sexy-urls

Will friendly_id help us about SEO?

I have a question regarding the history module.

Let's say that I create a post titled "Hello" and get the url site.com/post/hello but I decide to update the title to "Hello World" and I now have an updated URL site.com/post/hello-world.

I use the history module to redirect from the old url to the updated one.

What happens if I try to create a new post with the old title? (Imagine that I have validates :title, :uniqueness=> true)

Will ActiveRecord take friendly_id's historic slugs into consideration when validating future user inputs?

Is there any way i could use a combination of two fields to use the Slug?

for instance I have

friendly_id :lname, :use => :slugged

and would like to add the first name of the user field - :fname to make it more unique.

Tried to follow this tutorial off a scaffold using rspec

# GET /articles/1
# GET /articles/1.json
def show
  @article = Article.find(params[:id])
  if request.path != article_path(@article)
    redirect_to @article, status: :moved_permanently
  end

  respond_to do |format|
    format.html # show.html.erb
    format.json { render json: @article }
  end
end

Threw the following failure:

1) ArticlesController GET show assigns the requested article as @article
   Failure/Error: get :show, {:id => article.to_param}, valid_session
   AbstractController::DoubleRenderError:
     Render and/or redirect were called multiple times in this action. Please note that you may only call render OR redirect, and at most once per action. Also note that neither redirect nor render terminate execution of the action, so if you want to exit an action after redirecting, you need to do something like "redirect_to(...) and return".
   # ./app/controllers/articles_controller.rb:21:in `show'
   # ./spec/controllers/articles_controller_spec.rb:55:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

Quick fix I'm using... but if there is a more eloquent way I'd love to know...

# GET /articles/1
# GET /articles/1.json
def show
  @article = Article.find(params[:id])
  if request.path != article_path(@article)
    redirect_to @article, status: :moved_permanently
  else
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # show.html.erb
      format.json { render json: @article }
    end
  end
end

Does FriendlyId work with nested resources?

I have an app that is using acts_as_tree and what I would like is for my url's on my page models to not include the model name, can friendly_id help with this?

Is there anyway for me to use both friendly_id and the record id? I'd like to use friendly_id in my consumer-facing URLs, but the record id in my admin URLs... is there anyway to do that?

EDIT: Ok, I see that I can manually change the parameter in the URL, and it still works as expected.. but my path helpers all use the friendly id, e.g.:

edit_admin_user_path(user.id) #=> /users/some-friendly-id/edit

How can I get this?

edit_admin_user_path(user.id) #=> /users/4/edit
edit_user_path(user.id) #=> /users/some-friendly-id/edit

History option is enabled for my model and when I update the slug, friendly_id_slugs slug is not getting updated. so when I create new record with the same title it is throwing uniquness error.. Please help me on this...

Anyone know if there's a way to remove the :id version of the url from working? For example, if someone visits /users/:username it brings them to that user's profile. If they visit /users/1 it brings them to the user with :id of 1. Is there a way to prevent this?

Thanks!

I have a question about the history feature.

I implemented it on one of my models, but it seems that it only keeps a history of the original slug, even after every edit. Is this how it's supposed to work?

Say I have a title of "Hello World" which generates a slug "hello-world"

If I edit this to "Hello World 2" and then eventually to "Hello World 3", am I supposed to have all 3 history changes, or just the original?

hello-world - original works
hello-world-2 - doesn't work <-- does this not get stored?
hello-world-3 - latest works

Thanks!

I am trying to use friendly_id with ActiveAdmin and I am sending friendly_id in my model a function showdate_as_url

  def showdate_as_url
    "#{showtime.strftime("%Y/%m/%d")}"
  end

to get this to work I have this in my routes:

  resources :episodes, :id => /[0-9]+\/[0-9]+\/.+/

All works great outside of active admin, but in the active admin scope this date based url dose not work. I have tried setting the to_param back to id with a before filter in active admin - which works again, but then leaving active admin my friendly_id does not work any more.

Any ideas anyone?

As far as SEO is concerned, is there a difference between mysite.com\records\1-my-record vs mysite.com\records\my-record ?

If the answer is no, this seems like a lot of work to remove a leading #?

Has anyone tried to build associations with friedly_id and having difficulties, and if so, how do you go about solving it?

User < ActiveRecord::Base
 has_one :user_detail
extend FriendlyId
  friendly_id :username


UserDetail <<ActiveRecord::Base
 belongs_to :user

Based on that i

Yes - how does it work with nested resources?

Does slug support traditional Chinese character?

here is the code

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  extend FriendlyId
  friendly_id :name, use: :slugged
end

Let's say I create an new article with Chinese title.

It seems friendlyId is unable to save the Chinese title in slug column. So the URL still show the id of the article.

If I do this

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  extend FriendlyId
  friendly_id :name
end

It works but I have to ensure no duplicate name.

Any way to solve this?

I've got my app setup to have multiple organizations, and multiple pages per organization (identified via the subdomain). Is it possible to have FriendlyId check for uniqueness only on a per-user basis?

Thus that there can be multiple /home pages, but are unique within a given organization.

Very nice video :)
But I must convert ~ 1.300.000 records on my database.
Know you faster metod that this ?

Article.find_each(&:save)

Thanks for reply.

Is there a way to disable friendly ID in development mode?

What about using a different column than "slug", I see some reference to setting configuration options in the documentation, but I have no idea how.

Any idea how to have it so that the controller is not being seen in the url?

For example, i got it working with this:
https://www.domain.com/users/jimmy-hendricks

I like it to be this instead:
https://www.domain.com/jimmy-hendricks

Just like facebook/twitter did in theirs.
Thanks

The history feature isn't working for me. I've done exactly as the tutorial has done but I get the following error when I try accessing the old url after editing it to a new url:

"Render and/or redirect were called multiple times in this action. Please note that you may only call render OR redirect, and at most once per action. Also note that neither redirect nor render terminate execution of the action, so if you want to exit an action after redirecting, you need to do something like "redirect_to(...) and return"."

def show

@track = Track.find(params[:id])

if request.path != track_path(@track)
 redirect_to @track, status: :moved_permanently
end

@profileimg = @track.author.image_url(:thumb).to_s
if (@track.active != true) && (@track.author != current_user) 
  redirect_to tracks_url, alert: 'The track you were trying to view was not published yet (still in draft) and you are not the author.' 
else 
  @mission = @track.missions.order("position ASC")  
  @comment = @track.track_comments

  count_hits()    
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html #show.html.erb
    format.json { render json: @track }
  end
end
end

Friendly_ID was working for me before I edited by After editing the _add_slug_to_users.rb file then ran the command User.find_each(&:save)

For each user, I got an error that was similar to:

User Load (0.3ms) SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE ("slug" = 'carleton-howell' OR "slug" LIKE 'carleton-howell--%'ESCAPE '\') AND (id <> 2) ORDER BY LENGTH("slug") DESC, "slug" DESC LIMIT 1
User Exists (0.2ms) SELECT 1 AS one FROM "users" WHERE (LOWER("users"."email") = LOWER('example-1@railstutorial.org') AND "users"."id" != 2) LIMIT 1
(0.1ms) rollback transaction

After watching this Railscast and researching a bunch of other articles online, I figured out a way to do it with all of the upsides and none of the downsides–you get a pretty URL with both ID and name, parameterized, fully functional in controllers/views, without having to add a slug field to the database or anywhere else. Pretty efficient, I think. This is it if anyone is interested:

https://gist.github.com/rceee/5021916

Question! I am trying to eliminate the use of regular model IDs to access my pages. IE, right now, you can still go events/1, as opposed to just the custom (for me it's a hash) such as events/12k5s
I want to eliminate any possible guessing of other pages. How would I eliminate the old option?

Ryan says that actually friendly_id history doesn't work for old records but only for new ones.
That is not true anymore.
You just need to create friendly_id table before adding slug column and save your object.
Like this:

create_table :friendly_id_slugs do |t|
  t.string   :slug,           :null => false
  t.integer  :sluggable_id,   :null => false
  t.string   :sluggable_type, :limit => 40
  t.datetime :created_at
end
add_index :friendly_id_slugs, :sluggable_id
add_index :friendly_id_slugs, [:slug, :sluggable_type], :unique => true
add_index :friendly_id_slugs, :sluggable_type

add_column :articles, :slug, :string
add_index :articles, :slug
Article.reset_column_information
Article.find_each(&:save)

and everything will work fine as expected.

I also suggest, if you don't want to loose old urls, to execute this code after adding frindly_id_slugs and before adding column to articles

Article.find_each do |article|
    execute "INSERT INTO friendly_id_slugs(
            slug, sluggable_id, sluggable_type, created_at)
            VALUES ('"+"#{article.id}-#{article.name}".parameterize+"', #{article.id}, 'Article', current_timestamp);"

    end

current_timestamp if you are using postgresql

When you guys move on to Rails 4, use

puts "friendly_id :foo, use: [:slugged, :finders]"

puts "friendly_id :foo, use: :slugged"

Thank you! This was the easiest way to ensure that people couldn't use a brute force attack to find every user ID on my site.

If you are going to use :histroy with friendly_id 5 you should consider the new change in slugs' regenrations. As version 5 the slugs are not updated on save unless you set them to nill first.

  def update
    @product.slug = nil
    respond_to do |format|
      if @product.update(product_params)
        format.html { redirect_to @product, notice: 'Product was successfully updated.' }
        format.json { render :show, status: :ok, location: @product }
      else
        format.html { render :edit }
        format.json { render json: @product.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
      end
    end
  end

Like the URL to this very page, I want to have urls like this:

http://domain.com/products/454-table-lamp

So I use friendly_id like so:

extend FriendlyId

friendly_id :slug_candidates, use: :history

def slug_candidates
  [
      [:id, :title]
  ]
end

Now, since friendly id generates the slug before the object is saved I end up with an url like so (Please note the missing id in the URL):

http://domain.com/products/table-lamp

Now while this is not too bad as such. As soon as I save another Product called "Table Lamp", I will get an URL like this:

http://domain.com/products/table-lamp-ebaf4bf5-a6fb-4824-9a07-bdda34f56973

So my question is, how can I make sure, friendly ID creates the slug containing the ID as well.