Editing parameters from lowercase to uppercase in routes.rb?

Question

I'm working on a Ruby on Rails app where my routes can properly handle something like http://localhost:3000/CA to go to some page about California. It handles lower case "ca" but is there a way such that if my user manually types in lower case "ca", the URL/Routes will display capital "CA"?

Answer 1

If user request for http://localhost:3000/ca it should redirect to (301 redirect) http://localhost:3000/CA, That you can handle in your controller

def controller_name
  if(params[:id].to_s != params[:id].to_s.upcase)
    redirect_to urlname_url(:params[:url].to_s.upcase), :status => :moved_permanently
  end
  # rest of the code
end

It is good to have unique urls as duplicate urls have negative impact on SEO.

Answer 2

You can use a route matching to redirect to a capitalized version of the desired route.

I don't know what your routes file looks like so I will provide you with a simplified version of something I came up with that you can use to build what you need.

Say I have a states controller that has an action for every single state abbreviation. I could declare my route like this (for the get action StatesController#ca (for California)):

get '/CA', to: 'states#ca'

This would only match capitalized CA, so if a user typed http://localhost:3000/ca, they would get an error. To resolve this, I could match '/ca' to '/CA':

get '/ca', to: redirect('/CA')

This is very simplified. It is very unlikely you will want to describe every state abbreviation explicitly in your routes file.

Again, I don't know what you are using in your routes file, so I can only tell you (rather than show you an example) that you can provide a block to handle this logic.

Using a block you could also create logic that will handle cases when people inconsistently capitalize the abbreviation as well (Like transformingcA or Ca to CA).

There is some helpful / related documentation here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#redirection .