I converted one of my projects over to Edge Rails so I could start
playing with REST. It was a piece of cake and everything seems to work
great, except…
A couple of my controllers (providing wikki like functionality) expect
text strings rather than ID Integers in the URL. Pre-REST, my routes.rd
contained…
map.connect ‘wikki/:action/:title’,
:controller => ‘wikki’
And the controllers checked params[:title] to know which page to work
with. The URL’s look like mysite.org/wikki/show/MainPage
The table still has an ‘id’ column, since Rails likes that, but I’ve
added an additional index on the title column, since that’s what I’ll
usually be using to look up pages.
This is probably because I’ve only just started working with REST, but I
haven’t found a RESTful way to map certain parts of the URL to alternate
param keys. REST seems to expect that last field to always, always,
always be :id… which I’m sure I can work with if necessary, but…
:title is so much more descriptive and accurate. I’d really prefer to
have my controllers do WikkiPage.find_by_title(params[:title]), and
keep the beautiful RESTFUL URL’s like ‘mysite.org/wikki/MainPage’.
Maybe what I’m trying to do just isn’t appropriate with REST, or I’m
overlooking something obvious. Any suggestions or enlightening would be
greatly appreciated.