Re: [Cppcms-users] URL dispatching help

[Artyom B. <art...@ya...>]

none of those in my code, or any other call to mapper(), yet the application seems to work so far!
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>Perhaps the problem is that I'm generating all the HTML code in CppCMS templates and none in C++ functions. Is URL mapping relevant if I'm only using templates to output HTML? I assume it is, because the documentation states:
>    Such system allows using "url" tag in templates system easily as"
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>    <a href="<% url "/news/article" using article id %>" >...</a>
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>But I've been using something like:
>    <a href="/news/<%= article.id %>">...</a>
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>Which appears to work fine. I'm presuming there's some problem in my usage that URL mapping solves?
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Now this is actually a question that is relevant...


I'll explain - lets see some examples

Consider you are developing a generic application that can be installed in different location. For example:

www.website.com/coolnews/news/10
www.website.com/my/news/10
www.website.com/news/10

Consider you need to have some generic options in URL like language for example

www.website.com/my/news/ru/10
www.website.com/my/news/en/10

Now your URL generation becomes


   <a href="<%= root_url %>/news/<%= lang %>/<%= article.id %>" > ...</a>

More than that, consider you have URL like

    /wiki/this%20my%20title

i.e. you have native text than it should be

   <a href="<%= root_url %>/news/<%= lang %>/<%= article.id | urlencode %>" > ...</a>

Now put it in every possible corner - not easy.

So, this what url mapping you solves - it provide easy, generic and abstract way to generate URLs such that

1. You can change them easily and actual URL format is located in one place not all over the code
2. You can manipulate various different properties globally (locale/root etc)
3. The default filter is URL encode and not HTML escape that suites URL generation much better.




In my first applications I used the approach you had started with but it becomes much harder
to maintain - that is why url mapper was developed.


Artyom Beilis
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