SEO Friendly URL's Grails Plugin

This is a simple Grails plugin which helps to easily convert any string into a SEO-friendly one, eg, from "The Lord of the Rings" to "the-lord-of-the-rings".

Useful if you want SEO-friendly URL's like /book/the-lord-of-the-rings instead of /book/show/123.

The code is borrowed from Wordpress's formatting.php, and initially ported to Groovy by Jesús Lanchas.

Usage

The plugin provides a simple Grails service, friendlyUrlService, which you can inject like any other service in your application. That service has only one mehod, sanitizeWithDashes(text).

For convenience, the method asFriendlyUrl() is also added to the String meta class.

So, given this domain class:

class Book {
	String title
	String sanitizedTitle
	
	def beforeValidate() {
		if (!sanitizedTitle) sanitizedTitle = title?.asFriendlyUrl()
	}
	
	static constraints = {
		sanitizedTitle unique:true	//As an alternative, you may decide to make sanitizedTitle replace the default id.
	}
}

And given the following URL mapping:

class UrlMappings {

	static mappings = {
		"/book/$sanitizedTitle"(controller:'book', action:'show')
	
		"/$controller/$action?/$id?"{
			constraints {
				// apply constraints here
			}
		}

	}
}

You can do the following in your controller:

class BookController {

	def show() {
		[book: Book.findBySanitizedTitle(params.sanitizedTitle)]
	}

}

Note that you can also use friendlyUrlService.sanitizeWithDashes() in your controller.

Examples

The following is a snippet of the provided Spock unit test:

string                      | sanitized
"The Lord of the Rings"     | "the-lord-of-the-rings"   //Basics
"Raúl González Blanco"      | "raul-gonzalez-blanco"    //Accents
"España"                    | "espana"                  //N-tilde chars
"Los 3 Mosqueteros"         | "los-3-mosqueteros"       //Numbers
"Real Madrid® C.F."         | "real-madrid-cf"          //Edge cases