how do I make the URL's in Ruby on Rails SEO friendly knowing a @vendor.name?

Question

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 wher

Answer 1

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.