Miniurl generator

I got a small assignment to bang my head into for a couple of days.It was a url snipping application. I was also supposed to add Act_as_authenticated and and open_id authentication to the application.

There are two approaches to this problem:

1. I got this solution,over a discussion in Ruby On Rails spinoffs group in googlegroups.The approach is that, we create two methods in the model. a)initialize b) long_url. We use a before_filter and add it to the url controller ,generate a unique hash like initalizer code.Then we add initializer code to the index url to make a unique url from the given long url.Also, we store the long_url to the database and add a route in route.rb

2. There is a much simpler way to do this .I got it from Robby Russel’s site RobbyonRails , post of ruby url website creation.

We need to create 1 table,2 controllers and 1 model for that

The Model:

class Miniurl < ActiveRecord::Base

def self.gen_random(size=6)
chars = “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890″
short_url = “”
srand
size.times do
pos = rand(chars.length)
short_url += chars[pos..pos]
end
short_url
end
end

The Go Controller:

class GoController < ApplicationController
def go
end

def index
@url = Miniurl.find_first(["short_url = ?", @params["id"]])
if @url['long_url']
redirect_to @url['long_url']
end
end
end

Miniurl Controller:

def create
@miniurl = Miniurl.new(params[:miniurl])
@miniurl['short_url'] = Miniurl.gen_random(6)
if @miniurl.save
flash[:notice] = ‘Miniurl was successfully created.’
redirect_to :action => ‘list’
else
render :action => ‘new’
end
end

Then I generated the scaffold.Here we generate a random number using the gen_random(6) function of 6 digits.Then we add this to the index url and it works just fine

The bigger challange lies now, as I have to implement this code in RESTful and over edge rails.Will add that in this post soon.