Renaming a controller and redirection in Rails 3

I had the situation where I wanted to rename a basic part of the TellThemWhen website, that is, changing the name of “instants” to “notifications”. As this was a major part of the whole website, I had to make sure existing URLs still resolved correctly, luckily in Rails 3, this couldn’t be simpler!

This was a fairly big issue, “Instants” were the name of the basic product of the site, that is, you could make an “instant” to share with other people. After a lot of varied feedback however, we decided that “notification” was a better name.

But all the URLs our clients have been distributing look like http://tellthemwhen.com/instants/a3s2… and people have been landing on our new instant page directly per our analytics data.

So I needed a solution which basically remapped /instants/ANYTHING to /notifications/ANYTHING. Happily, the Rails 3 router solves this.

First step is to make a redirector. This is a really simple rack app, I made mine like so and just put it at the top of my config/routes.rb file, it looks like this:

module TellThemWhen
  class InstantRedirector
    def self.call(env)
      destination  = "#{env['PATH_INFO']}".sub('instant', 'notification')
      destination << "?#{env['QUERY_STRING']}" unless env['QUERY_STRING'].empty?
      [301, {'Location' => destination}, ['Instants are now called notifications']] 
    end
  end
end

TellThemWhen::Application.routes.draw do
  # ...
end

This is a simple Rack application. It has a class method called “call” that the current environment as an attribute, then pulls the path data substituting the first occurrence of “instant” with “notification”, then adds all of the params data on the end, and sends back a 301 redirect to the client with this new URL

Then in the routes.rb I have:

TellThemWhen::Application.routes.draw do
  # ...
  # Catch old instant style URL and redirect to Notifications
  match '(/my)/instant(s)(/:id)' => TellThemWhen::InstantRedirector
end

Here I need to match both “/my/instant” and “/instant” as well as the plural form of instants, I also want to be sure I am only matching the URLs that have instant directly off the root, just in case in the future I have a URL that looks like “/notification/instant”.

Using the parentheses around (/my) and (s) and (/:id) make these optional to the match process.

This match statement simply calls the rack app, InstantRedirector which then runs the call class method, returning the redirection array sending the user back to the correct notifications path with a 301 permanent redirect.

Sweet.

blogLater

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