SlugHub

Highly configurable URL slug generator, with persistent storage

SlugHub takes a string as an input, and converts it into URL friendly slug

For example:

var slugGenerator = new SlugGenerator();
var slug = await slugGenerator.GenerateSlugAsync("Some text that needs slugging");
Console.WriteLine(slug);

Output:

some-text-that-needs-slugging

Grouping Key

The Slug object has an optional.0 GroupingKey property.
This can be used to differentiate between applications, accounts, domains, or anything. You could use this to deploy a multi-tenant service that serves slugs to all of your services.

Generating unique slugs using iteration

Calling GenerateSlugAsync(input) with text that's already been slugged once (and therefore stored in the SlugStore - more on that later) will trigger an iteration.

Let's see an example:

var slug1 = await slugGenerator.GenerateSlugAsync("My Title");
var slug2 = await slugGenerator.GenerateSlugAsync("My Title");

Console.WriteLine(slug1);
Console.WriteLine(slug2);

The output here would be

my-title
my-title-1

The iteration seed can be configured using SlugGeneratorOptions when creating an instance of SlugGenerator

//start at 100
var options = new SlugGeneratorOptions { IterationSeedValue = 100 };
var slugGenerator = new SlugGenerator(options);

var slug1 = await slugGenerator.GenerateSlugAsync("My Title");
var slug2 = await slugGenerator.GenerateSlugAsync("My Title");

Console.WriteLine(slug1);
Console.WriteLine(slug2);

The output here would be

my-title
my-title-100

Generating unique slugs using "uniquifiers"

Uniquifiers are things that can create a unique version of your input.
Imagine you want to create slugged titles for pizza shops.
Now let's assume one is in London, one is in Leeds. We can pass London and Leeds in as optional uniqueifier parameters, which will then be included, if the original slug is already taken:

var slug1 = await slugGenerator.GenerateSlugAsync("Pizza Shop", "London");
var slug2 = await slugGenerator.GenerateSlugAsync("Pizza Shop", "Leeds");

In this example, the 2 slugs generated would be:

pizza-shop
pizza-shop-leeds

This is because pizza-shop initially did not exist, so it didn't need a uniqueifier.
The second time it tried to generate pizza-shop, it existed, so used the uniqueifier.

Storage

The default implementation of ISlugStore is a simple InMemorySlugStore
Exactly as it sounds, this simply stores slugs in memory.
They are not persisted outside of the application, and when the application exits, the stored slugs are lost.

If you want something more persistable, simply create one, implementing the lightweight ISlugStore interface:

public interface ISlugStore
{
    Task<bool> ExistsAsync(string slug);
    Task StoreAsync (Slug slug);
}