# Page caching with custom route **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [November 21, 2007, 1:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/page-caching-with-custom-route/120840 "2007-11-21T01:11:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![konrad](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@konrad](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/konrad)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2007, 1:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/page-caching-with-custom-route/120840/1 "2007-11-21T01:11:44Z")
I know the subject has been discussed a lot already, and there’s plenty of articles about it on the web. But I still haven’t figured out a solution to my problem, so here goes a cry for help. I have the following custom route in my application: map.connect ‘/:username’, :controller =\> ‘public’, :action =\> ‘show\_profile’ Basically, I want my users to be able to access their personal page through the “shortcut” [mywebsite.com is available for purchase - Sedo.com](http://www.mywebsite.com/username), so once that URL is entered or clicked, I redirect them to the appropriate action, which is show\_profile. There I have a simple code, kinda like this @user = User.find\_by\_username(params[:username]) to retrieve their data from the DB. This solution works great, but since their personal pages will be rarely updated, I want to use page caching to store it in a HTML file and avoid all Rails processing/DB queries, expiring the cache just when I actually need to. And now enters my problem. Rails is saving the cached pages as show\_profile.html. That clearly doesn’t work, since each user must have a different cached HTML with their specific data. I want the cached HTML files to be named after the username (username.html) not after the action (show\_profile.html). I’ve managed to make this work by adding the controller and action to the route, like this map.connect ‘/public/show\_profile/:username’, :controller =\> ‘public’, :action =\> ‘show\_profile’ and then my cached files would be stored in a ‘public/show\_profile/ username.html’ path. But I really need the URLs to be simple as [mywebsite.com is available for purchase - Sedo.com](http://www.mywebsite.com/username), so that doesn’t work. And as only fragment caching accepts a ‘action\_suffix’ parameter, I really can’t figure how to work this out with page caching. Any ideas? Thanks, Konrad ---
**Author:** ![konrad](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@konrad](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/konrad)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2007, 5:30am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/page-caching-with-custom-route/120840/2 "2007-11-21T05:30:05Z")
> I know the subject has been discussed a lot already, and there’s > plenty of articles about it on the web. But I still haven’t figured > out a solution to my problem, so here goes a cry for help. > > I have the following custom route in my application: > map.connect ‘/:username’, :controller =\> ‘public’, :action =\> > ‘show\_profile’ I don’t know, but I suspect Rails wants some sort of “anchor” before it will cache. Maybe not. But for example, what happens if I create a user one your site named “images” or “javascripts” ? That’s going to conflict with existing directories in RAILS\_ROOT/public Just something to think about. You may _want_ to move it “down a level”. -philip ---
**Author:** ![konrad](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@konrad](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/konrad)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2007, 1:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/page-caching-with-custom-route/120840/3 "2007-11-21T13:17:23Z")
That wouldn’t really be a problem, since I’ve configured my page caching path to be under RAILS\_ROOT/public/cache and I also get to choose their usernames. Right now the cached page, show\_profile.html, is been kept in the public/cache/public path (this last public directory is due to my controller, named ‘public’). The path is fine, I just need to be able to name the cached files after my usernames, not my action.