Support some sort of URL rewriting in Drapache

[gnrfan]

A simple URL rewriting mechanism would be very very welcomed. The good news is it's perfectly safe to add URL rewriting to Drapache and I will surely enable certain kinds of apps and scripts to be much more easily written this way.

Something with all of the power of mod_rewrite in Apache would be cool but I guess we don't need it since we got Python, right?

How about redirecting all 404s to a top level _rewrite.dbpy script if it's present?

Once you have that you would only need to provide us with a way to read the original requested path and we can put together our own pattern matching and URL rewriting mechanism.

Here's some code sample to help illustrate the idea:

import re

request = dbpy.http.get_request()

m = re.compile('^/posts/(?P<post_id>\d+)$')

if m.matches(request.redirect_uri):
post_id = m.groupdict()['post_id']
dbpy.http.redirect('/read_post.dbpy?post_id=%d' % post_id)

[louissobel]

hey @gnrfan, this is a good idea. i definitely agree that routing is something that its missing, and I was working on a possible implementation when I released it.

my idea was to have one dbpy file, and then the requested path as a query parameter,

So that one file will get executed every time, and it knows what route the user is trying to get.

the idea of the 404 exception handler is a really cool one though, the downside is an unnecessary request to dropbox.
it would have to be implemented at a high level in the request, probably in dbserver.py. There is a catch block there that catches a dropbox ErrorResponse. That's where 404s originate, so that's where they could be caught.

[gnrfan]

Sounds good. How about having both mechanisms and making the completely optional? I'd say they could be placed in the top level of the folder and be called _router.dbpy and _notfound.dbpy respectively.

[gnrfan]

Something to work out with both would be a way to directly dispatch the re-routed request from the server side without sending a redirection response to the client.