Rails routes with :name instead of :id url parameters

Question

I have a controller named 'companies' and rather than the urls for each company being denoted with an :id I'd like to have the url use their :name such as: url/company/microsoft instead of url/company/3.

In my controller I assumed I would have

 def show    @company = Company.find(params[:name])  end 

Since there won't be any other parameter in the url I was hoping rails would understand that :name referenced the :name column in my Company model. I assume the magic here would be in the route but am stuck at this point.

Answer 1

Good answer with Rails 4.0+ :

resources :companies, param: :name 

optionally you can use only: or except: list to specify routes

and if you want to construct a URL, you can override ActiveRecord::Base#to_param of a related model:

class Video < ApplicationRecord   def to_param     identifier   end    # or   alias_method :to_param, :identifier end  video = Video.find_by(identifier: "Roman-Holiday") edit_videos_path(video) # => "/videos/Roman-Holiday"