Easier way to generate paths

Question

Songs on Rap Genius have paths like /lyrics/The-notorious-b-i-g-ft-mase-and-puff-daddy/Mo-money-mo-problems which are defined in routes.rb as:

map.song '/lyrics/:artist_slug/:title_slug', :controller => 'songs', :action => 'show'

When I want to generate such a path, I use song_url(:title_slug => song.title_slug, :artist_slug => song.artist_slug). However, I'd much prefer to be able to type song_url(some_song). Is there a way I can make this happen besides defining a helper like:

  def x_song_path(song)
    song_path(:title_slug => song.title_slug, :artist_slug => song.artist_slug)
  end

Answer 1

Perhaps instead of defining two slugs you could just have one that has both the title and artist as part of it. So your route would be:

map.song '/lyrics/:slug', :controller => 'songs', :action => 'show'

Then in your model define a to_param that returns the slug:

class Song < ActiveRecord::Base
  def to_param
    artist.gsub(/\W+/, '-') + '/' + title.gsub(/\W+/, '-')
  end
end

I'm not completely sure if that will work (it might try to encode the "/" although if you change the route to

map.song '/lyrics/*:slug', :controller => 'songs', :action => 'show'

you might be able to get around that. Hopefully that at least gives you ideas of the right place to look.