[web-devel] Type-safe URL handling

[Jeremy Shaw]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>wrote:

> Jeremy,
>


> We'd been discussing the PathInfo class previously; I understand now what
> you're trying to achieve with it, but I think for a lot of use cases using a
> parser like that will be unnecesary. For those cases, I'd hate to introduce
> a parsec dependency, especially given the 2/3 split we're dealing with right
> now.
>

Well, parsec is in the haskell platform, so it's really a question of can be
it implemented so that it works with both 2 and 3.


> I know it's painful to split this up into even more packages, but we do you
> think of adding web-routes-parser?
>

I would consider it, but I don't understand how that would work...

So far you have been pretty unexcited about the parsing having a type
similar to:

 [String] -> (Either String a, [String])

because it is often 'unnecessary'. But the problem with, [String] -> (Either
String a), is that, as far as I can tell, it won't work in the cases where
it *is* necessary. And you can't simply switch to, [String] -> (Either
String a, [String]), when that happens.. But perhaps I am missing something
here..


> Also, question about the Site datatype: Did we want the formatLink and
> parseLink functions to work on [String] instead of String? I think I see
> advantages either way. Also, I'm not sure if I sent this previously, but I
> think the defaultPage function is redundant; that should probably be
> specified by 'parseLink ""'.
>

I will have to think about [String] vs String more. I don't want using Site
to mean you have to use PathInfo, but switching to [String] wouldn't have
that effect, and would mean that people would not have to worry about those
pesky encoding issues. The only real use case I have for not using PathInfo
is if you wanted to create a function like: gfromPathSegments :: (Data url)
=> PathInfo -> Either String url. And that can be done most easily if
PathInfo = [String]. So I think I'll make that change. In the old code base,
where there was no url encoding done by the library, it did not really make
a difference.

Regarding defaultPage, not all methods of generating formatLink / parseLink
lend themselves to handling "" very easily, so it seemed nice to have a
single place that can add that case in, rather than add similar code to all
the parsers.. Also, I think that I sometimes changes the landing page of my
site. But I think I will make 'defaultPage' a Maybe value, and bill it as a
way to 'override' where "" resolves to.


> I'll try to get started on porting the Yesod mkResources code over to
> web-routes now.
>

awesome!

- jeremy
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