"#{id}-#{name.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/i, '-')}"


I can’t take credit, its from here: http://www.notsostupid.com/blog/2006/07/07/urls-on-rails/

Thanks for the tip. I didn’t realize that, I’m going to give it a try.

Eldon,

I came across Simply_Helpful recently when looking for something else, so I guess I’m not the only one to feel the pain. If I understand correctly, Simply_Helpful adds helper methods. I wanted to do the ID generation in the model itself. I feel it belongs there.

Re: your URL slugs tip, you can override to_param (i.e., name your method to_param instead of url_slug), and Rails’ built-in routing commands will use the combined id-and-name whenever it builds a URL, so you don’t need to manually specify it.

The Simply_helpful plugin in Rails 1.2 features a built-in set of methods for this. (dom_id and dom_class). I can’t recall if they were going to be included into core or not, but I’ve used them with some edge stuff and they’ve been especially nice for RJS.

There was a good write up about it a while back at http://www.matthewman.net/articles/2006/09/04/new-rails-feature-simply_helpful