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

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.