Rails slugs in URL - using Active Record Model Post's Title attribute instead of ID

Question

I\'ve been trying to make my Rails create URLs to show records by using their title instead of their ID in URL such as:

/posts/a-post-about-rockets

Following

Answer 1

This isn't necessarily a direct answer to your question, but have you looked at the Stringex plugin (http://github.com/rsl/stringex)? It's a great way to auto-create slugs for your records.

You can just add something like the following to your model:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_url :title
end

and it will auto-create slugs from your title and save it to the slug column.

It's also really smart about the way it creates slugs. For example, a title of "10% off, today only" gets turned into "10-percent-off-today-only".

Pretty slick!

Answer 2

find_by_foo is not something that you need to define. ActiveRecord will take of it for you, as long as you have a column named "foo". Adding an exclamation point like you did will cause an exception to be thrown if no record is found, as opposed to returning nil without the exception if you don't use the exclamation point.

As for your specific issue, you added your slug to Post, but you're trying to search on Project.

Answer 3

Stringex gem is great to generate the slug itself, but I don't agree that saving it on the database is a good idea. You need to remember that if something relevant to the slug changes you need to update your slug column to. E consistent.

In the end, it's duplicated information, no matter in what form. I wrote a post exactly because of this reason.

http://blog.ereslibre.es/?p=343

I hope the post is of some help. I tried to explain everything there.