[UPDATE] This article accidentally got deleted, along with all the comments. Shame on my trigger-happy mouse finger, which clicked “OK” without reading the contents of the delete confirmation. So, thanks to Jeff Whitmire who found the text of the article in his RSS feed. Sorry to those who commented – there were some good thoughtful ones.

In my Rails projects, I sometimes have trouble remembering all my complex routes. Not only that, it’s a bummer to have to type out that long line every time I need to generate a URL.

So instead, I let the models tell me their URLs.

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class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :category

  include ActionController::UrlWriter
  default_url_options[:host] = "www.example.com"

  def url
    category_article_url(self.category, self)
  end

  def path
    category_article_path(self.category, self)
  end

end

Now I can say @article.url, which will generate

http://www.example.com/categories/123/articles/456-my-article

or @article.path, which will give me just the path:

/categories/123/articles/456-my-article