[Haskell-cafe] Happstack: moving the uploaded file

[Jeremy Shaw]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 1:05 PM, Nikita Karetnikov <nikita at karetnikov.org> wrote:
>
> Thanks, but it fails when a user tries to access ‘/view’ before
> uploading a file.

Yeah, I didn't bother to implement error handling.

> Also, I want the file to be available only at
> ‘/view’.

The version I provided meets that requirement for viewing the file.
Perhaps you also want the the POST address to be /view?  Ultimately,
you need three end points:

 1. a url to GET the file
 2. a url to POST the file
 3. a url that shows the form

How you arrange that depends  a lot on your design goals and
requirements. If you only allow the user to upload the file once, then
you could have:

 1. GET /view, shows the form if the file does not yet exist
 2. POST /view handles the file upload
 3. GET /view shows the file if it has been uploaded

This does not provide a way to view the form again once the file has
been uploaded. You could also do something like;
 1. GET /file/upload_form, shows upload form
 2. POST /file, handles submission
 3. GET /file shows file if it exists, or redirects to /file/upload_form

Or.. whatever you want.

> I’ve attached a version that’s based on yours, can it be
> further improved?  For instance, is there a need for ‘seeOther’?

After the file is upload -- you need to return some sort of Response
to the user. One logical choice is to redirect to the client to GET
the resource that was just uploaded. In theory, at the end of
handleUpload you could call readFile+output directly to show the file.
But if the user then refreshes the page, it will attempt to POST the
data again. If you have the redirect in there, then when they reload
the page, it will simply perform the GET request again.

As for 'improving' the code -- I think it mostly comes down to
personal taste at this point.

- jeremy