Simple Acts_as_tree with nested_resources

Question

Using Rails 3.1.1 and the gem acts_as_tree. I have googled the issue and checked similar questions here at SO (the answers are too old, or irrelevant).

I have a model called articles with a route that today looks like:

  resources :articles, :path => '', :only => :show 
  resources :articles, :path => 'articles', :except => :show

I have three articles: "book", "chapter1" and "chapter2". Where book is parent to chapter1 and chapter2.

Today, my path to each article is: host.com/book, host.com/chapter1 and host.com/chapter2. I want the url path to be host.com/book/chapter1 and host.com/book/chapter2 , i.e. nested routes.

How can I create this in a clean simple manner?

Basically, I want a path that will be host.com/:parent_id/:parent_id/:id with N numbers of :parent_id. Pretty much how Wordpress-articles are routed.

I don't believe route globbers is the solution, but I might be wrong. It seems to give the same result for host.com/:id and host.com/foo/bar/:id which will result in duplicate content.

Answer 1

A)

If you have a solution for the routing and the only problem with it is that you're concerned about duplicate content issues, you could consider adding <link rel="canonical" href="..."> to the pages generated from those requests. It's not bulletproof though, as Google considers it a suggestion.

Not sure if the route globbers solution would take care of generating the URLs with parent IDs though.

B)

You don't need the parent IDs to perform the routing, correct? You just want to include them in the URLs and route those requests the same as if using the URLs like example.com/chapter1, correct?

If you'd consider a solution that's not purely at the Rails level, what about rewriting the URLs on those requests so that /:parent_id/:parent_id/:id becomes /:id before Rails processes it? That would be easier if there was a static prefix, like /articles/:parent_id/:parent_id/:id.

I imagine you'd need to write some helpers to generate the URLs with parent IDs for linking to those resources.

Duplicate Content

Either way, you'll need to generate URLs that include the parent IDs, so duplicate content issues probably aren't too likely if you only link to those resources using those URLs.

Answer 2

You have three "articles"... "book", "chapter1" and "chapter2" all represent same 'resources', named 'articles'. Same 'resource' cannot be nested. If you need nested routes you have to define separately parent resource and child resource. following code spinet may help you

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :chapter
  accepts_nested_attributes_for :chapters
end    

class Chapter < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :book
  acts_as_tree :parent_id
end

Answer 3

match '*p1/*p2/*p3/.../*pn' => 'articles#show'

The ... is not literal, just define as many parameters as you need upto n.

URL:
host.com/book/chapter1
params[:p1] = 'book'
params[:p2] = 'chapter1'
params[:p3] = nil


URL:
host.com/book/chapter1/section2/sentence4
params[:p1] = 'book'
params[:p2] = 'chapter1'
params[:p3] = 'section2'
params[:p4] = 'sentence4'
params[:p5] = nil

That'd have to be your LAST route.

I think it would also make any catchall routes inoperable, but they're now commented out in the default routes.rb in Rails 3, If you use them, you'd have to manually specify all routes normally handled by the old style catchall routes.

And, if you have a controller named articles, you could never have a book titled 'articles' same with all your controllers, To be safe you probably have to rename all your controllers, i.e articles becomes X_articles. You could never have a book call X_articles then, and so on....

Totally untested.

Answer 4

What you're looking to do is use Rails for something it isn't made for. No matter what answer you get here, it either won't be RESTful, DRY, or make sense to be used with Active Record. Consider restructuring your idea, or bring your application to another platform if it's not too late.

• Source to back up my claim: https://stackoverflow.com/a/174287/628859