[web-devel] ANN: url-generic-0.1: Parse/format generic key/value URLs from record data types.

[Jeremy Shaw]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Christopher Done
<chrisdone at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 20 June 2011 20:05, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy at n-heptane.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> How is this actually different from web-routes (which already supports
>> automatic url deriving via Template Haskell, generics, or
>> quasi-quotation)?
>
> 1) Erm, it's actually documented? ;-)

I am planning to write documentation for web-routes this week or next
week. There is an additional web-routes extension I need to finish up
first. In fact, I was working on that code when I got distracted by
this thread :p

>> You suggest that web-routes requires a single URL type for all the
>> routes and that your code allows for multiple types. But I do not see
>> how that is actually done.

The same approach can be done with the existing web-routes code. Here
is a conversion:

{-# LANGUAGE RecordWildCards, DeriveDataTypeable, TemplateHaskell #-}

import Data.Data
import Data.List
import Data.Maybe
import Web.Routes
import Web.Routes.TH

data Event = Event { eventId     :: Integer -- ^ The event id.
                  , eventScope  :: Bool    -- ^ Show the scope?
                  , eventLayout :: Layout  -- ^ Layout for the page.
                  }
 deriving (Data,Typeable,Show)

data Layout =
 Wide | Thin | Collapsed
 deriving (Typeable,Data,Show,Enum)

data Home = Home
 deriving (Data,Typeable,Show)

$(derivePathInfo ''Bool)
$(derivePathInfo ''Layout)
$(derivePathInfo ''Home)
$(derivePathInfo ''Event)

router :: String -> IO String
router url =
 fromMaybe (error "404!")
          (listToMaybe $ mapMaybe ($ url) routes)

routes :: [String -> Maybe (IO String)]
routes = [route eventPage
        ,route homePage]

route :: (PathInfo a) => (a -> IO String) -> (String -> Maybe (IO String))
route handler url =
 case fromPathInfo url of
   Right a -> Just $ handler a
   Left e -> Nothing

eventPage :: Event -> IO String
eventPage Event{..} = return $
 "Event page! Layout: " ++ show eventLayout

homePage :: Home -> IO String
homePage Home = return $
 "Home page! Click here to go to the event page: " ++
 toPathInfo Event { eventId = 1, eventScope = False, eventLayout = Thin }

Here I am using the existing template haskell code to derive the
printer/parser pair.

The template haskell code uses a different set of formatting rules
than your SYB code. But there is no reason why the syb code could not
be used with web-routes. In fact, it only requires a few small
modifications to your existing code. I have made the changes here:

http://hpaste.org/48039

The essence of the change is that it should work using [String] rather
than String. Where [String] is the list of / separated path segments.

That version will actually do the right thing if your record contains
a String and the String contains special characters like / or
non-ascii unicode characters. Plus it can be easily integrated with
the rest of the web-routes framework. It is just another way of
generating the printers/parsers.

That was one of the goals of the web-routes library -- the base
package does not provide any rules for how the urls should be
formatted. Instead we provide extension packages that provide various
methods and schemes. Or people can write their own -- there is nothing
sacred about methods we provide.

So, I would be happy to work with you to create a web-routes-syb
package that uses your set of encoding rules. (Actually, that modified
code on hpaste plus a  little extra glue code is all you really need).

That said, I do have a complaint about the particular set of rules you use.

You allow the fields to be specified in any order -- but that makes it
difficult to support record types that contain other record types,
doesn't it?

I am not sure why arbitrary ordering is more valuable than nested
records. If you are using the library to generate the urls, then you
already know the order. If you wanted to extend Layout with a
constructor that takes an argument;

data Layout = Wide | Thin | Collapsed | Arbitrary Integer

Then you are kind of stuck? If you get rid of variable field ordering,
then you can encode a much larger range of URL types.

Anyway, I highly recommend you build on top of web-routes. web-routes
is a pretty lightweight dependency and it already solves the problems
of low-level URL encoding, escaping, etc. It also provides integration
with yesod, happstack, hsp, and more. That means you can just focus on
the high-level issue of deriving a nice looking URL scheme using SYB.
If there is someway in which web-routes in not suitable to build on, I
would love to fix it.

- jeremy