Rails engine using user profile path from main app

Question

I have a rails engine that needs to link to a user profile. So for example for user joe, I want to do something like link to /profile/show/joe How should the engine access the path to the user profile?

My first instinct was to add a profile_path method to the User model, but this isn't very good because the models don't usually have access to routes and it kind of breaks MVC.

What is the best practice here?

Answer 1

# in your route file
map.connect 'article/:permalink', :controller => 'article', :action => 'view'
# in your views when linking
link_to "View #{article.title}", {:controller => 'designer', :action => 'view', :permalink => article.permalink}
# then in your controller you can use
@article = Article.find_by_permalink(params[:permalink])