Ruby On Rails Updating Heroku Dynamic Routes

Question

I've got an app which uses app-wide slugs (uses Slugalicious gem with Sluggable table), and have routed to these slugs by using this code:

  #Slugs
  begin  
      Slug.all.each do |s|
        begin
          get "#{s.slug}" => "#{s.sluggable_type.downcase.pluralize}#show", :id => s.slug
        rescue
        end
      end
  rescue
  end

I currently update the routes when I update the slugs model with this code:

after_save :update_routes

def update_routes
    Rails.application.reload_routes!
end

This works perfectly in dev:

Routes Work Well In Dev

The problem I'm getting is that if I update or create a new slug, Heroku doesn't update to accommodate it. It works in development, and (confusingly), it works if I do "heroku run rake routes" on Heroku. But the app just shows a 404 if I try to browse to the new URL. If I redeploy the app, all the routes work, which leads me to believe it's something to do with updating the routes app-wide

This question said it's something to do with running multiple processes on Heroku, but I've yet to find this.

Any ideas? Many thanks in advance

Any reason you don't have a single `/:slug` route and some conflict checking to keep slugs from matching application routes? — mu is too short, Oct 02 '13 at 18:35
Thanks for the question. What happens is that the slugs are all for specific pieces of content, and considering I have a separate admin area & the slugs are created by a single entity, I figured that I could keep on top of the routes myself. To be honest, I've not experienced that problem yet, so I've not had to write a fix :) — Richard Peck, Oct 02 '13 at 18:52

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 02 '13 at 20:05

Fixed it!

There is something called an "ActiveRecord Observer" which have been depreciated since Rails 4.0. I found this website which explained what I wanted to do, but it was slightly outdated. I've included by code for rails 4.0 below:

If you're using Rails 4, use the rails-observers gem

Add the call to your environment files:

#config/application.rb (can be placed into dev or prod files if required)
config.active_record.observers = :slug_observer

Add a new observer class into your models folder:

#app/models/slug_observer.rb
class SlugObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer
  def after_save(slug)
    Rails.application.reload_routes!
    slug.logger.info("Routes Reloaded")
  end

  def after_destroy(slug)
    Rails.application.reload_routes!
    slug.logger.info("Routes Reloaded")
  end
end

The way this works is to call these bolt-on functions once the original has been run. This allowed my app to operate the function indepenent of the model in question, thus updating the routes correctly.

Ruby On Rails Updating Heroku Dynamic Routes

1 Answers1

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