Here are some improvements for Fancy Named Routes - Part I. In this part we will be adding a more thorough solution for the html escaping in everywhere. I noticed this was absolutely important, when I tried to view an escaped url in a production environment with Apache with mod_proxy and mongrel_cluster. Apache doesn't like '%2F' in the title, and doesn't forward the request to mongrel, so it returns a nice 404.

To rid yourself of the problem once and for all, add this to your ApplicationController:

def url_for(options)
  url = super(options)
  url.gsub!("%2F","/") if has_nice_url?(url)
  url
end

def has_nice_url?(link)
  rs = ::ActionController::Routing::Routes
  segments = rs.recognize_path link
  rs.named_routes.routes.each do |key,value|
    return true if
      value.defaults.has_value?(segments[:controller]) and
      value.defaults.has_value?(segments[:action]) and
      value.defaults.include?(:nice_url)
  end
rescue ::ActionController::RoutingError
  logger.debug{"RoutingError has occured"}
end

Now there is no need for overloading link_to or redirected_to. Remember, you'll need this in your config/routes.rb, to make it all work:

map.show_article 'article/:id/*nice_url', :controller => 'articles', :action => 'show', :nice_url => nil

And in your model, you have to add:

def to_param
  self.id.to_s+'/'+self.title.gsub(/\W+/,'-').downcase+'.html'
end

Now you can make awesome links like this:

link_to h(@article.title), show_article_url(@article)
redirect_to show_article_url(@article)