Recently, I needed to create some static reporting pages for Skribit.  From a quick search, I got a lot of results that talk about Rails and static pages, but none did exactly what I needed:

1. To be able to generate pages with different paths from one URL
2. Pages to persist across Rails deployments

Not seeing any solutions that fit my needs, I set out to come up with my own.  Here is what I ended up with.

First, I needed to add a route for generating/displaying the reports:

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map.reports 'report/:year/:month/:day', :controller => 'report',
    :action => 'show', :year => nil, :month => nil, :day => nil

From here, I could just use the standard caches_page :show declaration, but that would only generate the page I wanted if I used /report/2009/05/25 as the URL.  What if I wanted /report to generate the report for the current week?  Well, you can do something like this:

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class ReportController < ApplicationController
  after_filter :cache_weekly_report, :only => :show

  def show
    if params[:year]
      @year  = params[:year]
      @month = params[:month]
      @day   = params[:day]
      if File.exist?("#{Rails.root}/public/report/#{@year}/#{@month}/#{@day}.html")
        redirect_to reports_path(
            :year  => @year,
            :month => @month,
            :day   => @day)
      else
        # render report for a specific day
      end
    else
      today  = Date.today
      @year  = today.year
      @month = today.month
      @day   = today.day

      # render report for the current week
    end
  end

  protected

    def cache_weekly_report
      cache_page(response.body,
            "/report/#{@year}/#{@month}/#{@day}.html") if @year
    end

end

The magic is in the after_filter method cache_weekly_report.  We basically use the same mechanism Rails page caching uses to save our new report page.  Now, calling /report will generate a static report at /report/2009/05/25, or whatever the current day is.

The last thing to do is to make sure that the reports persist through new server deployments.  That can easily be done with a symlink in your capistrano script:

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task :symlink_reports do
  run "mkdir -p #{shared_path}/report; ln -nfs #{shared_path}/report #{release_path}/public/report"
end
after 'deploy:update_code', 'deploy:symlink_reports'

And that’s it!  What do you think?  I’d love to know if there are any simpler solutions to this.