I have a few questions. What would happen if there are other numbers on the url? For example, 12-john-23. And wouldn’t an extra param be better, like edit/12?john-doe ?

Using an extra parameter means explicitly passing it to url_for/link_to, which would be extremelly inconvenient.

By the way, have you seen this article before? It suggests exactly the same thing. http://plasmasturm.org/log/358/

The permanent redirect is definitelly the right thing to do if you really want to preserve the RESTfulness of your URLs.

Postgresql in particular will error out if you pass in something as innocous as 1.0 in for an integer.

A better option, imho, would be to permanently redirect all “wrong” slugs to the correct one. This is much simpler to redirect and more robust.

class


class ActiveRecord::Base
def self.find_from_ids_with_coercion(ids, options)
find_from_ids_without_coercion(ids.collect(&:to_i), options)
end

class << self
alias_method :find_from_ids_without_coercion, :find_from_ids
alias_method :find_from_ids, :find_from_ids_with_coercion
end
end


In the former, you get a clean :id, and you just discard the readable text?

So instead of just doing

url_for :controller => “forums”, :action => “show”, :id => @forum

you need to do

url_for :controller => “forums”, :action => “show”, :id => @forum, :slug => @forum.slug

thus losing all advantages provided by the to_param method.

map.folder ‘:id’, :controller => ‘folders’, :action => ’show’,
:requirements => { :id => /\d+/ }
map.roll ‘:folder_id/:id’, :controller => ‘rolls’, :action => ’show’,
:requirements => { :id => /\d+/, :folder_id => /\d+/ }
map.photo ‘:folder_id/:roll_id/:id’, :controller => ‘photos’, :action => ’show’,
:requirements => { :id => /\d+/, :roll_id => /\d+/, :folder_id => /\d+/ }

And a helper method in app/controllers/application.rb:

def pretty_url_for(object, *args)
options = pretty_url_args_to_hash(*args)

options[:flags] ||= []
for flag in options[:flags] do
options[flag.to_sym] = “”
end
options.delete :flags

if object.is_a?(Folder)
return folder_url(options.merge({ :id => object.id }))
elsif object.is_a?(Roll)
return roll_url(options.merge({ :id => object.id,
:folder_id => object.folder.id }))
elsif object.is_a?(Photo)
if options[:size].nil?
return photo_url(options.merge({ :id => object.id,
:roll_id => object.roll.id,
:folder_id => object.roll.folder.id }))
else
return photo_raw_url(options.merge({ :id => object.id,
:roll_id => object.roll.id,
:folder_id => object.roll.folder.id }))
end
elsif object.to_sym == :root
return url_for(options.merge({ :controller => ‘folders’,
:action => ‘list’ }))
else
return url_for(options)
end
end

This results in urls like http://example.com/photos/2/36/164, of which only the ‘164′ is used to find the photo in question. Not the prettiest, but better than the default, I think. I’ll see if I can rework it to use your technique to make the URL look a bit better.

So, I tried the fix suggested for other DBs. The one in the body of the post led to this error when booting rails:
Exiting
./script/../config/../lib/sluggable.rb:5:in `alias_method’: undefined method `find_from_ids’ for class `ActiveRecord::Base’ (NameError)

and the one suggested in the comments by Alex Wayne gave this error: Illegal instruction when I tried to load a page.

Any ideas?

Hell, I could probably tweak the couple filed required myself.

/[^a-z1-9]+/i

Should be

/[^a-z0-9]+/i

Bye

def exchange_special_chars(string)
INT.each do |key, value|
string =string.gsub %r([#{key}]), value
end
string
end

To do this, I dropped the following pastie into my application.rb:

http://pastie.textmate.org/66219