Routes and primary keys in rails

Question

I am a rails rookie and fear that my question is woefully ignorant - please be gentle.

I am building an app that will catalog and monitor other websites, and need to synchronize with an external data source (thus overiding primary key).

I have the model below, but i cannot figure out the routing for accessing individual records (tho list works)

any pointers?

class Affiliate < ActiveRecord::Base

require 'resolv'
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'rwebthumb'
  include Simplificator::Webthumb
  self.primary_key = "domain"
  validates_uniqueness_of :domain
  validates_presence_of [:org_name, :url], :message => "can't be blank"

  after_create :generate_thumbnail 

  def to_param
    id.chomp.gsub(".","")
  end


  def generate_thumbnail
    wt = Webthumb.new(APP_CONFIG['webthumb_api']['key'])
    job = wt.thumbnail(:url => url)
    job.write_file(job.fetch_when_complete(:medium2), "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/data/#{id}.png")
  end

  def thumbnail_url
    "/data/#{id}.png"
  end

  def thumbnail_localfile
    File.exist?("#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/data/#{id}.png") ? "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/data/#{id}.png" : nil
  end

  def thumbnail_last_updated
    if thumbnail_localfile
      File.new(thumbnail_localfile).mtime.to_s(:long)
    else
      "No such file"
    end
  end


end

Answer 1

Stack Overflow responders are rarely mean, even if they are their posts are quickly edited by someone with higher rank.

To get a list of all of your routes you can navigate to your rails directory in terminal and then issue the command:

rake routes

This will spit out all of the routes in your application. If you created the model using a scaffold generator you can normally get to it by going to http://localhost:3000/:model_name/:action_name/:id . So if your model was named Affiliate, and your action was to show a Affiliate, and you wanted to show the Affiliate with an ID of 22. You would go to http://localhost:3000/Affiliate/show/22 . I hope this helps, if not please follow up with comments to the answer, i understand that getting started with something new even learning the right questions to ask can be a challenge in and of itself.

Answer 2

If you generated the Affiliates model by using the scaffold generator then you should be able to access individual affiliates by doing http://localhost:3000/Affiliates/show/

If this does not work, try specifying a route in routes.rb in your projects config directory.
There you can associate a url to an action and then writing the action yourself. Entry for routes.rb: map.connect 'affiliates/:id', :controller => 'affiliates', :action=> 'show'

and then a simple function in the controllers to return the affiliate

function in .rb : def show affiliate = Affiliate.find_by_id(params[:id]) end

Now the affiliate variable will contain attributes of the affiliate identified by :id

Answer 3

Thank you both.

It turns out the issue was the ordering of routes in my routes.rb