dinosaurs eat everybody

This was a pretty busy week. I ended up flying back to Chicago on Thursday for my bachelor party, which was really awesome! These good times didn’t leave a lot of time for building things but I managed to get some interesting routing work done on the Reclab site.

I want Reclab to namespace songs and tracks by username, similar to the way Github namespaces repos. Obviously I also want to use nice identifiers for the resources rather than just id numbers, so I started by setting up FriendlyId, which is a great gem for this sort of thing.

What’s really cool about FriendlyId is that it can generate a slug that is unique across multiple fields in the object. For example, I want to allow user1 and user2 to both be able to have a song name “My Song One” so I want the path to each song to be something like user1/songs/my-song-one and user2/songs/my-song-one. Note that the song identifier “my-song-one” is only locally unique, not globally unique. To do this FriendlyId lets you scope slugs:

extend FriendlyId
friendly_id :name, use: [:slugged, :finders, :scoped], scope: :user

Then, in order to get things to work with ActiveAdmin I had to make Songs “owned” by Users. If you don’t do this, ActiveAdmin tries to use the FriendlyId slug as a globally unique identifier. This is an easy fix in the /admin/song.rb:

ActiveAdmin.register Song do
  belongs_to :user

I still need to clean up the routing in the rest of the app but this was a big step forward to some nicer paths.