how make user profile pages accesses through myside.com/USER_ID in rails

Question

Hello,

I'm using Rails and I have a User Controller for creating new users. To view current users I have to type something like:

mysite.com/users/USER_ID

I want to change to:

mysite.com/USER_ID

What is the best way to acheive that?

Thanks,

Tam

Answer 1

You would need to define a new root in config/routes.rb like

map.user '/:id', :controller => 'users', :action => 'show'

And then implement the show method - your user id will be in params[:id]

Answer 2

To improve a bit your generated URLs, you could also add a to_param method to the User model to get something like:

def to_param
  "#{id}-#{username}"
end

map.users '/:id', :controller => 'users', :action => 'show'

http://yourdomain.com/142-yaraher

That way, Rails will still work properly (by calling .to_i on your param[:id]) and get better URLs.

Keep in mind that you should remove some special characters from the method you would use, so it should be more likely something like:

"#{id}-#{n.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/i, '-')}"