Rails - FriendlyId and Conditions

Question

I have a model posts, which belongs_to category (which uses friendly_id). Now i want to list all Posts in an Category. To get the index page i want to use a link like: http://mysite/posts/category/_category_slug_ , for that i made the following route:

match 'posts/category/:category/' => 'posts#index'

And in my post controller i got:

def index
  if params[:category]
    @posts = Post.all(:joins => :category, :conditions => {"categories.cached_slug" => params[:category]})
  else
    @posts = Post.all.reverse
  end
...

It works like it should, but i dont think its the friedndly_id way to do it.

Is there a better way to achive this? thanks for your help.

Answer 1

FriendlyId adds the ability to do a find on a model using the slug, and is smart enough to check the cached_slug column first.

You can achieve the same result by performing a find on the Category model first then getting all the posts.

This assumes there is a has_many and belongs_to association in place with the referencing ID columns (or HABTM)

def index
  if params[:category]
    @posts = Category.find(params[:category]).posts
  else
    @posts = Post.all.reverse
  end
...

Since you're passing in a category param (being friendly_id), it makes sense to reference it via the Category model.

-- more info added --

ALSO: Historical finds will still work .. So, if you have generated a new slug by renaming a category, the old url will behave correctly (great if you're avoiding 404's)