Dynamic SEO-friendly URLs

Question

I'd like to deploy dynamic URL's for my app in two ways:

1. when viewing available vehicle, I get a link like: http://www.url.com/2006-Acura-MDX-Technology-Package
2. I also have a filter page, so here, the URL will change according to the filters selected like: http://www.url.com/2007-Nissan or http://www.url.com/2007-Nissan-Maxima and so on depending on the filters the user has chosen.

What's the best way to go about this?

EDIT 1

This now works

def get_absolute_url(self):
    return u'%s-%s-%s-%s-%s' % (self.common_vehicle.year.year,
                                self.common_vehicle.series.model.manufacturer,
                                self.common_vehicle.series.model.model,
                                self.common_vehicle.series.series, 
                                self.stock_number)

Then in my template I have:

<a href="{{ vehicle.get_absolute_url }}/">
  <span class="vehicle-title">
    {{ vehicle.common_vehicle.year.year }}&nbsp;
    {{ vehicle.common_vehicle.series.model.manufacturer }}&nbsp;
    {{ vehicle.common_vehicle.series.model.model }}&nbsp;
    {{ vehicle.common_vehicle.series.series }}
  </span>
</a>

All that remains is getting the stock number passed to the details view...so far I've done it like so:

(r'^inventory/details/(?P<stock_number>[-\w]+)/$',....

Answer 1

if you have a database entity corresponding to one page (e.g. vehicle view and a Vehicle DB table), you can use define get_absolute_url() method in the model class.

more on get_absolute_url: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/instances/#get-absolute-url

e.g:

class Vehicle(models.Model):
    name = ...
    year = ...
    fancy_stuff = ...

    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return u'%s-%s-%s' % (self.year, self.name, self.fancy_stuff)

whenever you are working with vehicle objects, you can get the full 'seo-friendly' url ...

---

my naive approach for the filter would be:

• write an appropriate regex in urls.py, either passing on a whole string value to a view function for further dispatch or designing the regex to be consistent and structured ..

  (r'^filter/(?P<name>[a-zA-Z]+)/(?P<year>\d+)/(?P<type>\d+)/$)', ...
  

• make the appropriate DB queries

• display ..