renaming routes (map, link_to, to_param) in rails

Question

Hey there,

I'm having a little issue...I setup a rails application that is to serve a german website. To make use of Rails' internal pluralization features, I kept all my models in english (e.g. the model "JobDescription"). Now, if I call "http://mysite.com/job_descriptions/", I get all my job_descriptions....so far, so good. Because I didn't want the english term "job_descriptions" in my url, I put the following into my routes.rb

map.german_term '/german_term', :controller => 'job_descriptions', :action => 'index'
map.german_term '/german_term/:id', :controller => 'job_descriptions', :action => 'show'

If I call "http://mysite.com/german_term/" or "http://mysite.com/german_term/283" I get all my job_descriptions, which is fine.

However, to make the URL more SEO friendly, I'd like to exchange the id for a more userfriendly slug in the URL. Thus, I put the following in my job_description.rb:

def to_param
"#{id}-#{name.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]+/i, '-')}"
end

which, whenever I use "job_description_path" in any link_to method, renders my URLs out to something like "http://mysite/job_descriptions/13-my-job-description-title".

However, and this is where I'm stuck, I'd like to get "http://mysite/german_term/13-my-job-description-title". I already tried to exchange the "job_description_path" with "german_term_path" in the link_to code, but that only generates "http://mysite/german_term/13". Obviously, to_param isn't called. One workaround I found is to build the link with:

<%= link_to job_description.name, german_term_path(job_description.to_param) %>

But that's rather tedious to change all the link_to calls in my code. What I want is to replace "job_description" by "german_term" whenever it occurs in a URL.

Any thoughts?!?

Regards,

Sebastian

Answer 1

Rails only utilizes the

def to_params 
end

URL builder when you are using a restful route/link helper. The only way I am aware of is to do it similar to how you did, unless you are willing to just scrap your english language links and do it all in German. In that case, just get rid of the named route lines and change the to_params to use the correct name field from the database. At that point, the REST routes should behave correctly.

Answer 2

I think you're going to need to use the restful route helpers to get what you want.

In that case, it wouldn't take much re-factoring (assuming you've mapped JobDescriptions as a resource). Leave your to_param as is and change your JobDescriptions route to something like the following:

map.resources :job_descriptions, :as => 'german_term'

Hope this helps!