Challenge

[Brian Candler]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 09:19:11AM -0600, Michael D. Ivey wrote:
> Tuples as URL segments...interesting.  My brain immediately went to
> /monkeys/[koko,pops] but that's not legal.  After spending too much  
> time in the spec when I should be getting ready for work, I came up  
> with this:
> 
> /monkeys;koko,pops
> 
> ; signifies params for a path segment....so it says "the collection  
> of monkeys, limited by this tuple" ... legal, semantic....kinda  
> pretty if you're a URI geek, too.

FWIW, Rails have dropped their use of the semicolon, apparently because of
some compatibility problems. i.e. they now use /monkeys/123/squawk instead
of /monkeys/123;squawk

See:
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/10/5/rails-1-2-4-maintenance-release

Given that a tuple is always of fixed size, I would be inclined towards
/monkeys/koko/pops, if only because (a) in the degenerate case of the
single-key tuple it's the same as now, and (b) it doesn't introduce any
more characters which need escaping if they occur within the key columns.

Given a composite key, perhaps the router should set the 'id' parameter to
an array? This would be convenient if the ORM supports composite keys in
this way, as you could still do

    Monkey.find(id)       # id = ['koko','pops']

I don't know which, if any, ORMs would support this. But in any case you can
always do

    Monkey.find_by_firstname_and_lastname(*id) || (raise "No banana")

But in any case maybe it's better to name the key components explicitly,
e.g.

    r.resources :monkeys, :resource_id=>[:firstname,:lastname]

which could just build a pattern of monkeys/:firstname/:lastname and the
routing code wouldn't have to change.

> Anyway, interesting stuff, thanks for the email.  I didn't see an  
> official entry into the contest, though.  :)

I don't know what the prize is, but I can probably live without it :-)

Regards,

Brian.