pecan/docs/source/routing.rst

Routing

When a user requests a certain URL in your app, how does Pecan know which controller to route to? Pecan uses a method known as object-dispatch to map an HTTP request to a controller. Object-dispatch begins by splitting the path into a list of components and then walking an object path, starting at the root controller. You can imagine your application's controllers as a tree of objects (branches of the object tree map directly to URL paths). Let's look at a simple bookstore application:

from pecan import expose

class BooksController(object):
    @expose()
    def index(self):
        return "Welcome to book section."

    @expose()
    def bestsellers(self):
        return "We have 5 books in the top 10."

class CatalogController(object):
    @expose()
    def index(self):
        return "Welcome to the catalog."

    books = BooksController()

class RootController(object):
    @expose()
    def index(self):
        return "Welcome to store.example.com!"

    @expose()
    def hours(self):
        return "Open 24/7 on the web."

    catalog = CatalogController()

A request for /catalog/books/bestsellers from the online store would begin with Pecan breaking the request up into catalog, books, and bestsellers. Next, Pecan would lookup catalog on the root controller. Using the catalog object, Pecan would then lookup books, followed by bestsellers. What if the URL ends in a slash? Pecan will check for an index method on the current object.

Routing Algorithm

Sometimes, the standard object-dispatch routing isn't adequate to properly route a URL to a controller. Pecan provides several ways to short-circuit the object-dispatch system to process URLs with more control, including the special _lookup, _default, and _route methods. Defining these methods on your controller objects provides additional flexibility for processing all or part of a URL.

_lookup

The _lookup special method provides a way to process a portion of a URL, and then return a new controller object to route to for the remainder.

A _lookup method will accept one or more arguments, representing chunks of the URL to be processed, split on /, and then provide a *remainder list which will be processed by the returned controller via object-dispatch.

Additionally, the _lookup method on a controller is called as a last resort, when no other controller matches the URL via standard object-dispatch.

from pecan import expose
from mymodel import get_student_by_name

class StudentController(object):
    def __init__(self, student):
        self.student = student

    @expose()
    def name(self):
        return self.student.name

class RootController(object):
    @expose()
    def _lookup(self, primary_key, *remainder):
        student = get_student_by_primary_key(primary_key)
        if student:
            return StudentController(student), remainder
        else:
            abort(404)

An HTTP GET request to /8/name would return the name of the student where primary_key == 8.

_default

The _default controller is called when no other controller methods match the URL via standard object-dispatch.

from pecan import expose

class RootController(object):
    @expose()
    def hello(self):
        return 'hello'

    @expose()
    def bonjour(self):
        return 'bonjour'

    @expose()
    def _default(self):
        return 'I cannot say hi in that language'

Overriding _route

The _route method allows a controller to completely override the routing mechanism of Pecan. Pecan itself uses the _route method to implement its RestController. If you want to design an alternative routing system on top of Pecan, defining a base controller class that defines a _route method will enable you to have total control.

Controller Arguments

A controller can receive arguments in a variety of ways, including GET and POST variables, and even chunks of the URL itself. GET and POST arguments simply map to arguments on the controller method, while unprocessed chunks of the URL can be passed as positional arguments to the controller method.

from pecan import expose

class RootController(object):
    @expose(generic=True)
    def index(self):
        return 'Default case'

    @index.when(method='POST')
    def index_post(self):
        return 'You POSTed to me!'

    @index.when(method='GET')
    def index_get(self):
        return 'You GET me!'

Helper Functions

Pecan also provides several useful helper functions. The redirect function allows you to issue internal or HTTP 302 redirects. The redirect utility, along with several other useful helpers, are documented in pecan_core.

@expose

At its core, @expose is how you tell Pecan which methods in a class are publically-visible controllers. @expose accepts eight optional parameters, some of which can impact routing.

expose(template        = None,
       content_type    = 'text/html',
       generic         = False)

Let's look at an example using template and content_type

from pecan import decorators

class RootController(object):
    @expose('json')
    @expose('text_template.mako', content_type='text/plain')
    @expose('html_template.mako')
    def hello(self):
        return {'msg': 'Hello!'}

You'll notice that we used three expose decorators. The first tells Pecan to serialize our response namespace using JSON serialization when the client requests /hello.json. The second tells the templating engine to use text_template.mako when the client request /hello.txt. The third tells Pecan to use the html_template.mako when the client requests /hello.html. If the client requests /hello, Pecan will use the text/html template.

Please see pecan_decorators for more information on @expose.