[web-devel] Type-safe URL handling

[Jeremy Shaw]

A variation which is more obviously hierarchical in nature:

data User = User LastName FirstName
data Section = Recent | TopRated
data UserHomeURL = Wall Section | Profile
data UserURL = ViewHome User UserHome

Which would be used to construct urls like:

/shaw/jeremy/wall/recent
/snoyman/michael/profile

etc..

- jeremy



On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy at n-heptane.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 5:13 PM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> Can you give me any real-world examples where you would have URL routes
>> built up like that? It seems like this is an optimization for the abnormal
>> case.
>
>
> I am not sure I would consider it an 'optimization' -- with out this change
> the desired  behavior can not be expressed as far as I can tell.
>
> Off the top of my head, I have the following type in my image gallery
> library:
>
> data GalleryCommon
>     = ViewImage ImageId [Transform]
>       deriving (Eq, Ord, Show, Read, Data, Typeable)
>
> The ImageId and Transform properties are used in other url components (not
> shown here). They have PathInfo instances already.
>
> The Template Haskell or Regular libraries would generate a parser that
> looks a bit like:
>
> fromPathSegments = (string "ViewImage" *> ViewImage) <$> fromPathSegments
> <*> fromPathSegments
>
> Without the changes to the type, the TH code would not be able to reuse the
> existing PathInfo ImageId instance, but would instead be forced to handle
> the ImageId argument explicitly.. That is really unfortunate, because the
> path generated by the PathInfo ImageId instance is much cleaner than what TH
> would generate.
>
> It seems to me that the primary purpose of the PathInfo class is to allow
> you to build composable parsers / generates for urls. It seems odd to limit
> the composableness to only the last argument of a constructor..
>
> - jeremy
>
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