Solution to insert cross-hyperlinks of Rails objects inside text attribute (as HTML)

Question

I am working at a web app in Rails that behaves much like a CMS: there are articles, which have a text attribute that contains links to other articles (or other object classes). I'm currently storing the attribute as HTML.

Is there any good way to model those links in a way that is relative easy to change, and contain the reference to the object id, instead of the absolute url?

One of the solutons I was thinking was to use some kind of special mark-up, such as:

[link_to "Text for the link", Article:12]

where 12 is the id of the article it links to. This mark-up will be parsed when the text is rendered.

The downside of this is that I have to hack into TinyMCE (the editor I'm thinking of using to edit the HTML) so that it can insert links to other objects, by accessing the database and automatically assigning the object type and ID (the person who's editing the texts doesn't know the id's).

Is there any simple solution to this?

Or should I stick to using absolute urls (which, besides maintenance issues, is annoying in development, as they will always point to production and that is confusing for me)?

Additionally, does anyone have similar examples in other languages (php, Wordpress, other CMS, etc) that tackle this problem in a nice way? I'm thinking, this is pretty vital in CMS, and can reduce a lot of man hours if a nice system can handle all those links.

EDIT:

Another possible solution that I'm thinking about is letting the person copy the link of the article directly in the code, but it should, upon submission, generate the correct association id and make it so that if the url structure changes, the link is always up-to-date. I'd like to hear your opinions and experience with this approach, if you have tried it.

The challenge with this approach is parsing the link with Rails and finding out that it points to an Article, and that article has the id ##. Then I have to insert a shortcode that will always translate, upon parsing and rendering, to an actual link to that article.

I found a method that could make this feasible:

Rails.application.routes.recognize_path

But there may be some caveats that I don't see right now...

EDIT no. 2

I also want to specify that I chose CKEditor as the content editor, but I will consider other ones if there are clearer advantages.

Answer 1

I have built something similar using a shortcode system which would allow me to call specific methods on the model and replace the shortcode in the text:

Helper

def parse_shortcode(model)
  text = model.text      
  text.gsub(/(\[#!\s?\w+\])/i) do |match|
    result = model.try(match)
    result.nil? '' : link_to(result[:text], result[:url])
  end
end

Model

def contact_link
  { :text => self.name, :url => self.url }
end

View

<%= parse_shortcode(@article) %>

I haven't tested the above code and it is obviously a bit simplified but it explains my thought process behind this.

EDIT: Just to clarify my above example uses an invented shortcode syntax of [#! method]