Supporting URLs like /similar-to-:product in Ruby on Rails?

Question

I have been trying to use routes.rb for creating a URL /similar-to-:product (where product is dynamic) for my website. The issue is that routes.rb readily supports URLs like /:product-similar but doesn't support the former because it requires :product to be preceded with a separator ('/' is a separator but '-' isn't). The list of separators is in ActionController::Routing::SEPARATORS.

I can't add '-' as a separator because :product can also contain a hyphen. What is the best way of supporting a URL like this?

One way that I have successfully tried is to not use routes.rb and put the URL parsing logic in the controller itself, but that isn't the cleanest way.

Answer 1

I'm a little confused, but could you maybe add "to-" as a seperator?

Answer 2

I would refactor your URLs so that they're simply "similar-to/product"

Answer 3

In fact you can add - as a separator, then use route globbing.

map.similar_product '/similar-to-*product', :controller => 'products', :action => 'similar'

then, in ProductsController#similar

@product = Product.find_by_slug params[:product].join('-')

Though refactoring does seem nicer, since with this approach you'll need to specially handle all slugs that can contain hyphens.

Answer 4

An easy solution is using a routing filter. See README for details.

With routing filter you can have a url /similar-to-:product, preprocess it to /similar-to/:product before it gets to routing recognition. You'll also want to post-process generated paths back from /similar-to/:product to /similat-to-:product.