Get SEO friendly URLS with Rails without method_missing?

Question

Hi all,

Currently we are using method_missing to catch for calls to SEO friendly actions in our controllers rather than creating actions for every conceivable value for a variable. What we want are URLS like this:

/students/BobSmith

and NOT /students/show/342

IS there a cleaner solution than method_missing?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You can create a catch-all route. Put this at the bottom of config/routes.rb with whatever controller and action you want:

map.connect '*path', :controller => '...', :action => '...'

The segments of the route will be available to your controller in the params[:path] array.

Answer 2

You can define a route for that particular format fairly easily.

map.connect "/students/:name", :controller => :students, :action => :show, :requirements => {:name => /[A-Z][A-Z]+/}

Then in your show action you can find by name using params[:name].