Kansas City on Rails

Many social networking sites like Twitter have “pretty urls” that get you to a user’s profile in the fewest possible keystrokes. Their format is usually http://example.com/username, and it’s easy to add this to your own Rails application.

Let’s say you have a restful profiles controller that we use for the public-facing aspects of a user. Put this in your routes file:

# config/routes.rb
ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.resources :profiles
  map.resources :users

  map.profile_link '/:login', :controller => 'profiles', :action => 'show'
  
  map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
  map.connect ':controller/:action/:id.:format'
end

Notice we have our special named route “profile_link” after our resources. The Rails routing file works top-to-bottom, meaning Rails will grab the first route that matches the incoming url. If we put our profile_link route in front of the resources, this would confuse the routing engine and some of our restful routes would fail.

Now we need to setup our show action to use the login parameter to find the correct user:

# app/controllers/profiles_controller.rb
class ProfilesController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @user = User.find_by_login(params[:login])
  end
end

Of course, you’ll need corresponding view code in app/views/profiles/show.html.erb as well.

That’s all it takes to get short, sweet vanity urls in your rails application.

Tags: developers, Rails, routes, Ruby, ruby on rails

This entry was posted on January 25, 2010 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Rails, Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.