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

Ryan Bates has a great screencast on this very subject.

Basically you overload the to_param method in the Vendor model.

   def to_param
     permalink
   end

Then when you look up the resource in your controller you do something like this:

   @vender = Vender.find_by_name(params[:id])

But the problem with this is that you'll have to make sure that the vendors' names are unique. If they can't be then do the other solution that Ryan suggests where he prepends the the id to the name and then parses the resulting uri to find the item id.