how to use slug for only certain links in rails

I use a slug instead of an ID in my rails app to prettify the url when viewing a post.

Therefore in my articles.rb file I currently use this for all links:

 def to_param
    slug
  end

This results in a url like: ...articles/this-is-a-test-article

I now want to use the normal id url format only when editing a post, is there a way to modify this to allow me to do that?

i.e. ...articles/7

For reference, in my articles controller I have:

def edit
@article = Article.find_by_slug(params[:id])
end

Any help will be much appreciated, thanks.

Solution

friendly_id

You'll be much better using friendly_id

This works exactly how you need (you have the slug column already, and you'll need to do this):

#app/models/article.rb
Class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
    friendly_id :slug, use: [:slugged, :finders]
end

.find

The reason why friendly_id will be good is it has adapted the find method of Rails to handle both slugs & id's:

#app/controllers/articles_controller.rb
def [action]
    @article = Article.find params[:id]
end

This means you can do this:

article_path(@article) #-> can have either id or slug attributes present

This will populate the :id param with either the id or slug, depending on which is present, allowing you to call the find method in the controller for either.