Rails routes with clean urls

Question

My problem is i want to remove the querystring part of this URL and make it clean.

http://staging.mysite.com/mycontroller?name=/philippines/about-manila

currently i have MyController.index() and I parse the name parameter in this method.

What i would eventually want is this :

http://staging.mysite.com/mycontroller/philippines/about-manila

the parameter part 'philippines/about-manila' can have arbitrary number of parameters, like

http://staging.mysite.com/mycontroller/philippines/about-manila/people

How can i do this in routes?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4690298/how-do-we-identify-parameters-in-a-dynamic-url/4705154#4705154 — jdl, Mar 08 '11 at 14:12

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 08 '11 at 14:18

It sounds like you want route globbing. If you use:

map.my_route '/mycontroller/*parts',
             :controller => :mycontroller,
             :action => :index

and then go to the URL http://staging.mysite.com/mycontroller/philippines/about-manila/people, then your mycontroller controller's index action will be called, and params[:parts] will contain the array ["philippines", "about-manila", "people"].

Paul Schreiber · Answer 2 · 2011-03-08T17:07:45.713

2

Is it really arbitrary — or just variable?

If it's just variable, you can enclose optional parameters in parentheses:

match '/:city(/:section(/:subsection))', :controller => :mycontroller,
    :action => :index

For Rails 2.x:

map.connect '/:city(/:section(/:subsection))', :controller => :mycontroller,
    :action => :index

edited Mar 08 '11 at 17:07

answered Mar 08 '11 at 14:06

Paul Schreiber

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 08 '11 at 14:10

1

For Rails 2.x you can use

map.my_route '/:my_param', :controller => :mycontroller, :action => :index

Then in your controller you can access

params[:my_param]

If you want links just go with

my_route_path(:my_param => "mytekst")

answered Mar 08 '11 at 14:10

Adrian Serafin

3 Answers3