Rails%203%20In%20Action

Prettying URLs
of these invalid characters then it will be removed completely. By doing this, it makes
the name safe to be used as a parameter in the URL, hence the name parameterize.
Before you actually make this change, you’re going to write a test for it to make
sure that this feature of your code isn’t accidentally changed or removed. Because this
change is going to be for your Ticket model, you’re going to put the test for it in
spec/models/ticket_spec.rb, using the code from the following listing:
Listing B.1 spec/models/ticket_spec.rb
require 'spec_helper'
describe Ticket do
it "has pretty URLs" do
ticket = Factory(:ticket, :title = "Make it shiny!")
ticket.to_param.should eql("#{ticket.id}-make-it-shiny")
end
end
This code will use the factory you created in chapter 7 to create a new ticket with the
title “Make it shiny!” Then you call to_param on that ticket, and you expect to see it
output the ticket’s id followed by the parameterized version of “Make it shiny”: makeit-shiny.
When you run this test with bin/rspec spec/models/ticket_spec.rb, you’ll see
the following output:
expected "1-make-it-shiny"
got "1"
This is happening because you haven’t yet overridden the to_param method in your
Ticket model and it is defaulting to just providing the id. To fix this, you can open
the app/models/ticket.rb and add in the new method:
def to_param
"#{id}-#{title.parameterize}"
end
When you run our test again, it will now be green:
1 example, 0 failures
You don’t have to change anything else because Rails is still so incredibly darn smart!
For instance, you can pass this “1-make-it-shiny” string to the find method, and Rails
will still know what to do. Go ahead, try this:
Ticket.find("1-make-it-shiny")
If you have a record in the tickets table with an id value of 1, Rails will find this. This
is because Rails will automatically call to_i on string arguments passed to find. To see
this in action, you can do this in an irb session:
"1-make-it-shiny".to_i
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