Adding a record's attribute to the URL before the ID

Question

I'm trying to add a specific attribute of a record in Rails to the URL from something like:

domain.com/share/5

(where 5 is the record ID) to something like:

domain.com/share/johnsmith/5

where johnsmith is stored in record 5 . I'm alternating between these two routes to no success:

get "/share/:name/:id" => "share#show"
resources :share, :only => [:show]

And between these two methods:

share_path(doc.user.name, doc)
share_path(doc)

The show method in the ShareController is pretty standard.

---

The problem:

Using share_path(doc.user.name, doc) in the view generates a link to /share/johnsmith.5 , instead of /share/johnsmith/5 .

Answer 1

get "/share/:name/:id" => "share#show" should do the job. But you may have to look at the order of routes in routes.rb , maybe Rails took the wrong route?

Best tip to look at what's happening:

Call the URL in your browser (or using curl or whatever) and then look into your console where your started rails s (or rails server ).

There you should see something like this:

Processing by ShareController#show
Parameters: {"id"=>"5", "name"=>"johnsmith"}

Concerning the path methods:

Simply use rake routes , it will tell you which path methods are available.

Answer 2

No idea what happened but it resolved itself with this:

get "/share/:name/:id" => "share#show", :as => :share
share_path(doc.user.name, doc)

I do not get the . and / issue at all. I restarted everything and it was gone.