Rails RESTful Routing With '/' and Slugs

Question

I am looking to do something similar a wordpress slug where I have a URL like this while maintaining RESTful routing:

http://foo.com/blog/2009/12/04/article-title

The reason I am interested in keep RESTFUL routing is that I am unable to use many plugins because I am using custom routes.

I have already done the RESTful appearance with:

map.connect   '/blog/:year/:mon/:day/:slug',
              :controller => 'posts', :action => 'show',
                :year => /\d{4}/, :month => /\d{2}/,
                :day => /\d{2}/, :slug => /.+/,
                :requirements => { :year => /\d{4}/, :month => /\d{2}/, :day => /\d{2}/, :slug => /.+/ }

In order to write the links, I had to write custom link_to helpers to generate the proper URLs. I really would like to make this RESTful and have the link_to post_path( @post ) yield the URL above and the link_to edit_post_path(@post) ...article-title/edit

I also have :has_many => [:comments] and I would that to work as well. The link_to that I have tried looks like this:

 'posts', :action => 'show', :year => recent_post.datetime.year.to_s,
            :month => sprintf('%.2d', recent_post.datetime.mon.to_i),
            :day => sprintf('%.2d', recent_post.datetime.mday.to_i),
            :slug => recent_post.slug %>

and yields this (which isn't what I want):

http://foo.com/posts/show?day=30&month=11&slug=welcome-to-support-skydivers&year=2009

I'm not sure what I am doing wrong. Is it even possible to accomplish this?

Answer 1

I think it's not working because you're not using a custom route. I do this all of the time. I simply setup a simple custom route:

map.present_page '/blog/:year/:month/:day/:slug',
          :controller => 'posts', :action => 'show'

Then you should be able to do:

present_page_path(:year => 2009, 
                  :month => "December", 
                  :day => "13", 
                  :slug => "just-an-example")

The reason you're getting a query string is most likely because rails isn't making the connection to your route for whatever reason. Using a named route explicitly tells rails to use that route. Let me know if that solves it for you!

Answer 2

Here's how I went about this...

First, I'm not trying to use the route-generated url method. Also, I'm not going to the same extent as you in terms of checking formatting of the date parameters. Since I'm auto-generating the datestamps and the URL creation, I'm not concerned about format validity, I'm simply formatting a ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone object.

Let's start with the relevant route:

  map.post_by_date 'content/:year/:month/:day/:slug', 
                  :controller => 'posts',
                  :action     => 'show_by_date_slug'

Since I didn't want to worry about argument formatting, or repetition, I created a helper method and included the helper in the relevant controller:

  def pubdate_slug_url(post)
    year   = post.published_on.strftime('%Y')
    month  = post.published_on.strftime('%m')
    day    = post.published_on.strftime('%d')

    url    = "/" + ["content", year, month, day, post.slug].join("/")

    return url
  end

Finally, in my view, I simply call the method, passing in my Post object:

  <h2><%= link_to post.headline, pubdate_slug_url(post) %></h2>

I end up with a url like: http://wallscorp.us/content/2009/12/06/links

Cheers.