#63 Model Name in URL (revised)

Dec 16, 2012 | 9 minutes | Active Record, Routing

A model's ID in the URL is not very helpful to the user. Consider adding the name which can also improve SEO. Learn how to override to_param, add a slug attribute, and make a catch all route for deep nesting.

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Jeff Dickey almost 12 years ago

It's good to have a constraints: { format: :html } so images and other files 404 correctly. Otherwise you're going to get a lot of 500's

propercoil almost 12 years ago

hmm can you elaborate Jeff?

freizeitnerd almost 12 years ago

For me this article was useful: http://robotslacker.com/2012/01/rails-3-routes-configuration-dynamic-segments-constraints-and-scope/?replytocom=123

Pierre GD almost 7 years ago

Thanks Jeff !

Kyle Meyer almost 12 years ago

For simple to_param overrides that append a name to the ID, I wrote a really simple gem called pretty_param. You can check out the logic https://github.com/kaiuhl/pretty-param/blob/master/lib/pretty_param.rb, but essentially it's just a better DSL for the most common to_param overrides with better filtering of special characters.

Brandon almost 12 years ago

If you aren't creating too many of these routes I think the best way to do this is with static routes - e.g. get "/pricing" => "pages#pricing". It isn't strictly restful, but I think people sometimes go overboard with that. Not only is this simpler, but it also avoids the catch-all route issue mentioned as well as database performance issues brought up.

kobaltz almost 12 years ago

It would be neat if you showed how to make the slugs unique only to their parents and not site wide.

Jason Prins almost 12 years ago

Try this:

          ruby
        
validates_uniqueness_of :slug, scope: :parent_id

Stephen Hunter almost 12 years ago

Sorry, but you just blew my mind with Page.find_each(&:save)
I knew about find_each for batch loading, but what the heck is &:save and where else can I use it?
I mean, obviously I can see what it's doing, but can I use this anywhere a block is expected? When can't you use this notation?

John Allen almost 12 years ago

As long as you're calling a method directly on the object being iterated over (ie. Page#save) this will work.

Steven Nunez over 11 years ago

This is using symbol to proc. &:save is converted to {|obj| obj.save}. That means that any message you can send to an object is sendable. Really cool stuff! Use it in things like

          ruby
        
class User
  attr_accessor :name, :email
  def initialize(name, email)
    @name, @email = name, email
  end
end

bobby = User.new("bobby", 'bboy@example.com')
annie = User.new("annie", 'aack@example.com')
[bobby, annie].map(&:email) #=> ['bboy@example.com', 'aack@example.com']

Jason Charnes almost 12 years ago

I've been looking for a tutorial like this everywhere. I'm having an issue though. Whenever I go into my url and put /products/pricing (for example) it loads, but the url drops 'products' so its just /pricing. I followed the example code line by line, and then copied and pasted the code from the site into my project. Any thoughts?

Verdi Erel Ergün almost 12 years ago

Try to wrap your pricing resource in a namespace in your config/routes.rb like this

namespace :products do

... your pricing resource ..

end

here's the railsdoc
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#controller-namespaces-and-routing

Matt Long over 11 years ago

Fantastic! This is so helpful, Ryan. Thanks.

nafmarcus over 11 years ago

If I change the name of the record from A to B, I would like something like /products/A and products/B to work.

Is there an easy way to add this history functionality using this method, similar to what's included the Friendly_ID gem?

ckjain over 11 years ago

I am building and application which uses following railscast of Ryan
1. Authentication from scratch
2. Cancan for authorization
3. Multitenancy with scope.
4. Model name in url

It was working fine till the Multitenancy with scope but after implementing model-name in url i get following error in show action.

Couldn't find Article with id=batman-robin [WHERE "articles"."tenant_id" = 1]

If I comment out "load_and_authorize_resource" from controller the show action starts working. Can someone help me out with it?

Mathieu over 11 years ago

How would you go about adding the ID after the name if it is not unique?

L.S. Cook about 11 years ago

This is great and works on local, but throws a 500 on production for some reason. I'm thinking it has something to do with what he mentions around ~08:09

"... In a real application you'll want to check the entire path to make sure that the parents are correct"

and then he talks about the shortcut method. Any ideas for what the non-shortcut method would be? I have a Node model I would like to be invisible as parent

L.S. Cook almost 11 years ago

Never mind. . . it was a stupid oversight; my deploy script doesn't run migrations automatically (which I gotta fix) so the fix was simply to run a manual migration on prod:

bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

janchiks almost 11 years ago

followed the tutorial, but for the life of me cannot get this to work on rails 3.2.13 and ruby 2.0.0.
basically i get the following error with the controller's 'show' action:

ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound - Couldn't find Artwork with id=pirmais:
(gem) activerecord-3.2.13/lib/active_record/relation/finder_methods.rb:343:in find_one' (gem) activerecord-3.2.13/lib/active_record/relation/finder_methods.rb:314:infind_with_ids'
(gem) activerecord-3.2.13/lib/active_record/relation/finder_methods.rb:107:in find' (gem) activerecord-3.2.13/lib/active_record/querying.rb:5:infind'
(gem) cancan-1.6.9/lib/cancan/model_adapters/abstract_adapter.rb:20:in find' (gem) cancan-1.6.9/lib/cancan/controller_resource.rb:114:infind_resource'
(gem) cancan-1.6.9/lib/cancan/controller_resource.rb:68:in load_resource_instance' (gem) cancan-1.6.9/lib/cancan/controller_resource.rb:32:inload_resource'
(gem) cancan-1.6.9/lib/cancan/controller_resource.rb:25:in load_and_authorize_resource' (gem) cancan-1.6.9/lib/cancan/controller_resource.rb:10:inblock in add_before_filter'
(gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:451:in _run__369076481886043173__process_action__2635143404322980588__callbacks' (gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:405:inrun_callback'
(gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:385:in _run_process_action_callbacks' (gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:81:inrun_callbacks'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/abstract_controller/callbacks.rb:17:in process_action' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_controller/metal/rescue.rb:29:inprocess_action'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_controller/metal/instrumentation.rb:30:in block in process_action' (gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/notifications.rb:123:inblock in instrument'
(gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/notifications/instrumenter.rb:20:in instrument' (gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/notifications.rb:123:ininstrument'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_controller/metal/instrumentation.rb:29:in process_action' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_controller/metal/params_wrapper.rb:207:inprocess_action'
(gem) activerecord-3.2.13/lib/active_record/railties/controller_runtime.rb:18:in process_action' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/abstract_controller/base.rb:121:inprocess'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/abstract_controller/rendering.rb:45:in process' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_controller/metal.rb:203:indispatch'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_controller/metal/rack_delegation.rb:14:in dispatch' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_controller/metal.rb:246:inblock in action'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/routing/route_set.rb:73:in call' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/routing/route_set.rb:73:indispatch'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/routing/route_set.rb:36:in call' (gem) journey-1.0.4/lib/journey/router.rb:68:inblock in call'
(gem) journey-1.0.4/lib/journey/router.rb:56:in each' (gem) journey-1.0.4/lib/journey/router.rb:56:incall'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/routing/route_set.rb:612:in call' (gem) warden-1.2.1/lib/warden/manager.rb:35:inblock in call'
(gem) warden-1.2.1/lib/warden/manager.rb:34:in catch' (gem) warden-1.2.1/lib/warden/manager.rb:34:incall'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/best_standards_support.rb:17:in call' (gem) rack-1.4.5/lib/rack/etag.rb:23:incall'
(gem) rack-1.4.5/lib/rack/conditionalget.rb:25:in call' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/head.rb:14:incall'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/params_parser.rb:21:in call' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/flash.rb:242:incall'
(gem) rack-1.4.5/lib/rack/session/abstract/id.rb:210:in context' (gem) rack-1.4.5/lib/rack/session/abstract/id.rb:205:incall'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/cookies.rb:341:in call' (gem) activerecord-3.2.13/lib/active_record/query_cache.rb:64:incall'
(gem) activerecord-3.2.13/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/connection_pool.rb:479:in call' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/callbacks.rb:28:inblock in call'
(gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:405:in _run__4384397577656740839__call__2610537326534929259__callbacks' (gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:405:inrun_callback'
(gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:385:in _run_call_callbacks' (gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:81:inrun_callbacks'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/callbacks.rb:27:in call' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/reloader.rb:65:incall'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/remote_ip.rb:31:in call' (gem) better_errors-0.8.0/lib/better_errors/middleware.rb:84:inprotected_app_call'
(gem) better_errors-0.8.0/lib/better_errors/middleware.rb:79:in better_errors_call' (gem) better_errors-0.8.0/lib/better_errors/middleware.rb:56:incall'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/debug_exceptions.rb:16:in call' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/show_exceptions.rb:56:incall'
(gem) railties-3.2.13/lib/rails/rack/logger.rb:32:in call_app' (gem) railties-3.2.13/lib/rails/rack/logger.rb:16:inblock in call'
(gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/tagged_logging.rb:22:in tagged' (gem) railties-3.2.13/lib/rails/rack/logger.rb:16:incall'
(gem) quiet_assets-1.0.2/lib/quiet_assets.rb:18:in call_with_quiet_assets' (gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/request_id.rb:22:incall'
(gem) rack-1.4.5/lib/rack/methodoverride.rb:21:in call' (gem) rack-1.4.5/lib/rack/runtime.rb:17:incall'
(gem) activesupport-3.2.13/lib/active_support/cache/strategy/local_cache.rb:72:in call' (gem) rack-1.4.5/lib/rack/lock.rb:15:incall'
(gem) actionpack-3.2.13/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/static.rb:63:in call' (gem) railties-3.2.13/lib/rails/engine.rb:479:incall'
(gem) railties-3.2.13/lib/rails/application.rb:223:in call' (gem) rack-1.4.5/lib/rack/content_length.rb:14:incall'
(gem) railties-3.2.13/lib/rails/rack/log_tailer.rb:17:in call' (gem) rack-1.4.5/lib/rack/handler/webrick.rb:59:inservice'
/Users/janis/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/webrick/httpserver.rb:138:in service' /Users/janis/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/webrick/httpserver.rb:94:inrun'
/Users/janis/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/webrick/server.rb:295:in `block in start_thread'

and from what i understand there is problem with this line in:
(gem) activerecord-3.2.13/lib/active_record/relation/finder_methods.rb

343 raise RecordNotFound, "Couldn't find #{@klass.name} with #{primary_key}=#{id}#{conditions}"

Any help appreciated. by the way, had the same error when tried to implement friendly_id gem.

James Jason about 9 years ago

Thanks Ryan

bparanj over 8 years ago

This episode is updated for Rails 5 as a blog post Model Name in URL