how do I create a custom route in rails where I pass the id of an existing Model?

Question

I created the following route:

  map.todo "todo/today",
            :controller => "todo",
            :action => "show_date"

Originally, the 'show_date' action and associated view would display all the activities associated for that day for all the Campaigns.

This ended up being very slow on the database...it would generate roughly 30 records but was still slow.

So, I'm thinking of creating a partial that would first list the campaigns separately.

If someone clicked on a link associated with campaign_id = 1, I want it to go to the following route:

todo/today/campaign/1

Then I would like to know how to know that the '1' is the campaign_id in the controller and then just do its thing.

The reason I want a distinct URL is so that I can cache this list. I have to keep going back to this and it's slow.

NOTE: It's possibly the problem actually is that I've written the queries in a slow way and sqlite isn't representative of how it will be in production, in which case this work-around is unnecessary, but right now, I need a way to get back to the whole list quickly.

Answer 1

Just with the following :

map.todo "todo/today/:id",
        :controller => "todo",
        :action => "show_date"

This will create the /todo/today/:id url where id is whatever you set in the url.
You can then access it in your controller with params[:id].

You might be interested in reading Rails Routing from the Outside In, particularly the section about resources.

Answer 2

The code above by @Damien is correct but incomplete. It should be:

map.todo "todo/today/campaign/:id", :controller => "todo", :action => "show_date"

in your views all you have to do is:

<%= link_to "Campaign 1", todo_path(:id => 1) %>

or simply

<%= link_to "Campaign 1", todo_path(1) %>

and the particular campaign id can be fetched using params[:id] in your action.

And yeah, sqlite is not production ready.

EDIT: The latter part is quite easy to implement:

However, you have to change the route slightly, The route will now become,

map.todo "todo/today/:campaign/:id", :controller => "todo", :action => "show_date"

in your views:

<%= link_to "Campaign 1", todo_path(:campaign => "campaign", :id => 1) %>

In your todo controller, show_date action:

def show_date

#IF YOU ARE USING THIS REPEATEDLY IN LOTS OF DIFFERENT ACTIONS THEN A BETTER PLACE FOR THIS WOULD BE AS A HELPER IN application_controller.rb

 if params[:id].nil? && params[:campaign].nil?
    #DO SOMETHING WHEN BOTH ARE NIL,
 elsif params[:campaign]!="campaign"
    #DO SOMETHING WITH CAMPAIGN BEING SOMETHING OTHER THAN "CAMPAIGN"
 elsif params[:campain]=="campaign" && params[:id].nil?
    #DO SOMETHING WITH ID BEING NIL.
 else
    #FIND YOUR CAMPAIGN HERE.
 end
end

Hope this helps. :)