If I implement RESTful routing for a controller 'galleries' like as follows:
map.resources :galleries
By default the show url for this controller would be:
/galleries/:id
which would respond to any requests to /galleries/1 etc.
What if I had a gallery record in the database with a 'name' attribute with value 'portraits'. Could I do the same as follows:
/galleries/portraits
instead of doing
/galleries/1 ?
Then you have to think of what happens if the gallery name is something not very URL-friendly like 'Autumn/Fall2009#1' where you have a forward slash (will change the routing) and a dash (will not be submitted to the server if left unencoded). So, you will need urlencoding when generating such URLs.
In your Gallery model, add a #to_param method that returns what you want in the URL (in this case, name). In your controller, you still access the value through params[:id] and you'll probably have to use Gallery#find_by_name instead of Gallery#find.
As long as you use the provided helpers (gallery_path, etc.), your URLs should be pretty.