Rails - SEO friendly URLs with Self joined models

Question

Right now there are two models: Category and Product. Categories are self joining to make sub_categories. Category has_many Product, who of course belongs_to Category.

The question I have is this: How Do I map the routes for these resources so that they have SEO friendly URLS.

For example: If the user clicks on the "Lamas" category, then clicks on the "Maintenence" sub-category, and then finally clicks on the "Lama Polish" Product. The path will be: http://lamasareawesome.com/categories/1/categories/26/products/11

What I want is: http://lamasareawesome.com/lamas/maintenence/lama-polish

So far Im not having much luck trimming the controller name out of the path, and replacing it with a model attribute.

Answer 1

Creating routes which use another attribute than the ID is pretty trivial. FriendlyID a great out of box solution but it does will only get you to URLs that look like:

/categories/lamas/categories/maintenance/products/lama-polish

Creating URL's such as lamas/maintenence/lama-polish is definitely possible but will be difficult since its not conventional and there are many potential pitfalls.

You could for example start out with:

resources :categories, path: '/' do
  resources :categories,  path: '' do
    # resources :products 
  end
end

Which will create:

                Prefix Verb   URI Pattern                      Controller#Action
   category_categories GET    /:category_id(.:format)          categories#index
                       POST   /:category_id(.:format)          categories#create
 new_category_category GET    /:category_id/new(.:format)      categories#new
edit_category_category GET    /:category_id/:id/edit(.:format) categories#edit
     category_category GET    /:category_id/:id(.:format)      categories#show
                       PATCH  /:category_id/:id(.:format)      categories#update
                       PUT    /:category_id/:id(.:format)      categories#update
                       DELETE /:category_id/:id(.:format)      categories#destroy
            categories GET    /                                categories#index
                       POST   /                                categories#create
          new_category GET    /new(.:format)                   categories#new
         edit_category GET    /:id/edit(.:format)              categories#edit
              category GET    /:id(.:format)                   categories#show
                       PATCH  /:id(.:format)                   categories#update
                       PUT    /:id(.:format)                   categories#update
                       DELETE /:id(.:format)                   categories#destroy

But then there is a supersized gotcha - let's say the request is for

GET /lamas/joe-the-lama

How is Rails supposed to know that this request should be handled by LamasController and not CategoriesController ? You would have to do a database query for both. Of course this is not an issue if you always have two categories but you get my drift - things are going to get complicated fast.

The standard Rails style restful routing may be a bit wordy but it does avoid a lot of potential ambiguities.