Danpe Solutions: October 2012

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 64bit with RubyMine 4.5.4, Ruby 1.9.3, Rails 3.2.8.

It's more a feature than a problem :P

I wanted to access my model by name and no by id for example:

By id: | By name:

/friend/1 | friend/john

By default controllers use the following code to get the required instance from the database:


@friend = Friend.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
    format.html # show.html.erb
end

so first thing to try is:

@friend = Friend.find_by_name(params[:name])

ERROR!

So next i found map.connect...


map.connect 'friend/:name', :controller => 'friends', :action => 'show'

I found out that map.connect only available in rails 3.2 and was deprecated in rails 3.x

Have you ever heard of to_param ?
I just needed to add the following to my model (friend.rb):


def to_param
   name
end

And in the controller (friend_controller.rb):

@friend = Friend.find_by_name(params[:id])

No need to change anything in routes.rb!

For those of us who uses ActiveAdmin gem like me, there is another fix to be able to edit friends by name.

Add the following to your friends.rb: (ActiveAdmin.register Friend do)


before_filter :only => [:show, :edit, :update, :destroy] do
  @friend = Friend.find_by_name(params[:id])
end

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