# How to make a virtual page like '/page/:id' **URL:** \ **Category:** Radiant CMS\ **Created:** [January 20, 2008, 11:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-make-a-virtual-page-like-page-id/126608 "2008-01-20T11:15:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/f19dbf/32.png) [@foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/foobar)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2008, 11:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-make-a-virtual-page-like-page-id/126608/1 "2008-01-20T11:15:11Z")
While developing my first Radiant site I encountered a problem which overwhelms me. Also, I’m not a programmer, so its only worse. Please bear with me. First, I tried to make a page “/people” which lists all the people in the organization. So, I wrote “People” extension (my first), wrote some tags, and now I can enter a person into the database through the admin interface, and list every person in the database on the “/people” page. A small victory. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end here. Now I need to display everything there is about a person, but I don’t want to make a separate child page for each person. I think one page should be sufficient for that, so a virtual page is in order, right? Well, I tried that, and failed miserably. It getting frustrating, since I’ve been hanging with Google for more then two days now. Either the examples I found are too complex, or my skull is too thick. At the moment, I’m betting on the latter. So, hopefully, someone has already been there and can show in a simple way how to achieve what I need to. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/f19dbf/32.png) [@foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/foobar)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2008, 8:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-make-a-virtual-page-like-page-id/126608/2 "2008-01-20T20:01:49Z")
You’re on the right track. The “/people” page should be of a custom type that you create so that all child URLs are routed to a single virtual child page. I did this for the “Syllabi” at KCKCC over a year ago. Here’s a link to the code: > **[Esumm.com is for sale | HugeDomains](https://www.hugedomains.com/domain_profile.cfm?d=esumm.com)** > > Get this domain name before someone else does. Quick and painless shopping. Affordable payment options available. Look specifically at the “Syllabi Courses Page” and the “Syllabi Prefixes Page”. The “prefixes” page was used as the parent, the “courses” page as the virtual child. You can see these in action at: [http://www.kckcc.edu/academics/course-descriptions/](http://www.kckcc.edu/academics/course-descriptions/) Cheers, Sean ---
**Author:** ![foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/f19dbf/32.png) [@foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/foobar)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2008, 8:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-make-a-virtual-page-like-page-id/126608/3 "2008-01-20T20:55:50Z")
On Jan 20, 2008 8:01 PM, Sean C. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > [http://www.kckcc.edu/academics/course-descriptions/](http://www.kckcc.edu/academics/course-descriptions/) Thanks Sean. To my surprise, somehow I managed to make it work not long after clicking on the send button. I also found your extension which helped somehow, together with the archive extension. Who would say that simply stearing long enough at the code you don’t really understand could get you somewhere. 🙂 My head is spinning, but its fun. Now I need to make use of model associations. I see the syllabi is associated with courses etc, but haven’t found yet how you use it in the tags. ---
**Author:** ![foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/f19dbf/32.png) [@foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/foobar)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2008, 11:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-make-a-virtual-page-like-page-id/126608/4 "2008-01-20T23:35:06Z")
> Thanks Sean. To my surprise, somehow I managed to make it work not long > after clicking on the send button. I also found your extension which helped > somehow, together with the archive extension. Who would say that simply > stearing long enough at the code you don’t really understand could get you > somewhere. 🙂 My head is spinning, but its fun. > > Now I need to make use of model associations. I see the syllabi is > associated with courses etc, but haven’t found yet how you use it in the > tags. Look in lib/syllabi\_tags.rb for how the majority of the tags are defined. Basically, there’s \, \, \ tags and various others below it. All they do is assist in looping over the associations and emitting attributes, really. Sean ---
**Author:** ![foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/f19dbf/32.png) [@foobar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/foobar)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2008, 9:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-make-a-virtual-page-like-page-id/126608/5 "2008-01-22T21:17:20Z")
It sounds like the question was solved, but I just wanted to take a moment to plug my DataPages extension: [http://code.google.com/p/data-pages-extension/](http://code.google.com/p/data-pages-extension/) Provided you had a way to export your people-data into JSON files (or through a respond\_to block in another Rails app’s controller), you could make a Virtual Data page for your people directory that templates the external data. (See the examples on the wiki.) The upside of this would be that you wouldn’t have to co-mingle your people data with your document data, which is cleaner IMHO. Also, you wouldn’t have to implement new Radius tags if your data schema ever changes. -Andrew