CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railscase-sensitivecase-insensitive
bergie3000
bergie3000

Reputation: 1131

Case insensitive user names in Rails 3 routes

I am trying to allow users to access their accounts by their user name, regardless of how they capitalize it in the URL. So http://example.com/Username would go to the same page as http://example.com/username.

I am fine with the any other part of the URL being case sensitive (I know that's the standard), but I don't see a need to force a user to get the case of their user name correct in the URL.

Can this be done by adding certain settings in the routes.rb file alone?

I thought this would be straightforward but apparently it isn't.

I found a seemingly simple question here but there's only one answer that I think will help and it's too hacky (by the author's own admission)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 365

Answers (2)

John Naegle
John Naegle

Reputation: 8247

I believe this isn't a routing issue and you can address it in your controller code:

User.where("lower(username) = lower(?)", params[:username]).first!

or

User.where("lower(username) = ?", params[:username].downcase).first!

or

User.find(:first, :conditions => [ "lower(username) = ?", params[:username].downcase ])

Upvotes: 5

Thomas Klemm
Thomas Klemm

Reputation: 10856

It should work fine to handle this behaviour in the controller, not in the routes.

# config/routes.rb
match ':username' => 'users#show'

# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
def show
  username = params[:username]
  user = User.find_by_username(username) || User.find_by_username(username.downcase) 
  # or something along these lines...
end

An even nicer solution might be to store some kind of slug identification for the user that is always downcased and ready to be used in URLs. You could have a look at the awesome friendly_id gem for that purpose.

Upvotes: 1

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