Url for cities/regions/countries in Rails

Question

What do you recommend for displaying URLs and handling views in Rails for cities, regions, countries?

i.e:

/us/ca/San-Fransisco

/countries/us/regions/ca/cities/San-Fransisco

Should be able to: List all countries, list all regions within country and list all cities within a region and country.

Where would you put code for displaying all regions in a country?:

/us/regions/

/us

Should the code be in the region (action show) or country (action index) controller?

Answer 1

I would prefer the simple /us/ca/San-Fransisco. A shorter path will result in a listing:

• / lists countries
• /us lists us states
• /us/ca lists californian cities

Simple, short, clean - and will be honored by google ;-)

Answer 2

Agree with Arne. I don't see any problem with the first variant.

As for the second question, you better get the list of regions in the RegionsController.

Say you want to

GET /us/regions

then you should route it to

class RegionsController < ApplicationController
  # GET /:country_code/regions
  # GET /regions
  def index
    @countries = 
      if params[:country_code]
        Country.find_by_code(params[:country_code]).regions
      else
        Region.all # get all regions if country_code is not set
      end
  end
end

Answer 3

Hi, this is really interesting. I'm a newbie in website programming. I was wondering from where I can get the list of regions or cities in a specific country. What webservice should I use or should I store all the list in my own database? If option 2 is recommended, from where should I get this list? Any help is very appreciated.

Thanks :)