[Rails] Understanding URL rewriting

Eric Anderson eric at afaik.us
Sat Jan 8 21:17:01 GMT 2005


I am new to URL rewriting so bear with my while I try to get some 
understanding. For most application I have been using the standard:

/script.cgi?arg1=foo&arg2=bar

Now obviously /user/edit/eric looks much better for a URL that involves 
editing the "Eric" user. But how does this work out when you have 
multiple items. For example if I want to delete a group of users. I 
might have something like this in the old way:

/user/delete.cgi?id=3&id=5&id=7

or for a more readable format we could have:

/user/delete.cgi?username=eric&username=john&username=paul

This of course assumes that usernames are unique. :) So it seems that I 
would want something like:

/user/delete/eric/john/paul

This makes it obvious what is happening from the url. But how do I 
generate this? And if a action receives this request how does this get 
parsed so I have something like:

@delete_usernames ===>>> [ 'eric', 'john', 'paul' ]

This way I can then load up those users and delete them. I know that 
ActionController provides some methods for dealing with URL rewriting 
but I am unsure how to best use them. Any help or pointers are greatly 
appreciated.

Eric
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