Use Permalink in Rails

It is easy to setup permalinks in Rails, so that your application url will show the meaningful path other than the default controller/action/id format.

To enable permalink in Rails, you need to add a column to store the permalink string (give it any name e.g. permalink). Then in your model, override the to_param metod to use the permalink as shown below:

 class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :comments, :dependent => :destroy
 
  def to_param
    "#{id}-#{permalink}"
  end 
end

You might encounter a strange error that says

modelname_url failed to generate......

I had this problem on my server and it turns out that I had a '.' in my permalink. '.' is used to set sub-domain in your url. Having '.' unintentionally will make url invalid.