Rails%203%20In%20Action

546
appendix B
Tidbits
This appendix contains a collection of tidbits that we just couldn’t fit into the rest
of the book. They are designed to be read by themselves, although you are welcome
(and encouraged!) to read as many of them at once as you wish.
B.1 Prettying URLs
In your application you’ve got a URL such as /projects/1/tickets/2, which really
isn’t that pretty. Let’s take a look at how you can make the ticket’s ID part of these
URLs a little prettier, turning them into something like /projects/1/tickets/2-makeit-shiny.
Having URLs such as /projects/1/tickets/2-make-it-shiny will allow your users to
easily identify what that URL links to without having to visit the page. 1 Rails allows
you to very easily do this by overriding a method called to_param in the model
where you want to have pretty URLs. This method is defined like this within
ActiveRecord::Base, and so all your models inherit it:
def to_param
id
end
This method is used to construct the URLs generated by the link helpers in your
application such as project_ticket_path, if you use them like this:
project_ticket_path(project, ticket)
Rails does not care what the classes of the objects that are passed in here are; it just
assumes you know what you’re doing. What it does care about though is the output
of the to_param method, which must not contain any slashes. To get the pretty URL
you always wanted you can use the parameterize method on any String, which
works like this:
"Make it shiny!".parameterize
= "make-it-shiny"
It does this by substituting any character that isn’t a through z, the digits 0 through
9, a hyphen (-), or an underscore (_) into the - character. If the string ends in one
1 It’s also supposedly good for search engine optimization (SEO).