UrlDisp

What is UrlDisp

Problem statement

URLs are everywhere on the web. Most of them, however, are hard to remember, because they are meaningless for humans. This is wrong: URLs are a part of user interface, and therefore should be kept simple, meaningful and memorizeable.

Solution

UrlDisp provides (Fast)CGI programs a minimalistic domain-specific parser for URLs.

Hierarchical part of the URL (e.g., /foo/bar/ or /bar/baz/quix) is tokenized (turned into a list of "URL fragments", e.g. ["foo","bar"]) and matched against rules defined using UrlDisp combinators. Every rule consists of, basically, a predicate and a CGI action. Once a predicate is satisfied, an action is performed; otherwise, alternatives are tried in the order given ((<|>) associates to the left). The matching algorithm is backtracking.

Usage examples

Basics

A regular CGI action looks like this:

output "hello, world!"

This one replies to all requests with "hello, world!".

One can add a predicate to make things more interesting:

h |/ "hello" *> output "hello, world!"

This one will greet people only if the URL starts with "/hello". It will give a 404 error page otherwise.

Such "if-then" clauses can be combined using "or" -- (<|>) -- which associates to the left, so:

a <|> b <|> c

is equivalent to

((a <|> b) <|> c)

Anyway, code using UrlDisp shouldn't depend on this property.

To introduce an "and" in your rule, apply (|/) successively, as in:

h |/ "foo" |/ "bar"

Generally, other combinators will correspond to "and" and bind stronger than "or". For example:

h |// "GET" |/ "foo" |/ "bar" |? ("cmd", "foo") *> output "hello"
<|> endPath |? ("cmd, "bar") *> output "goodbye"

Will behave as follows:

• all GET requests to /foo/bar (and anything that follows) and parameter cmd set to "foo" will output "hello"
• requests with empty path and parameter cmd set to "bar" will output "goodbye"
• other requests will trigger a 404 page

As you can see, the (|/) combinator matches current token against its right operand. h is a special predicate that matches anything, it is used to begin a string of combinators.

One can also match against

• URL parameters,
• HTTP methods,
• and also convert token into a variable which is an instance of Read

There's also an API which is believed to be more human-readable.

Extending UrlDisp

The examples given above are not very interesting since one wants to interact with the outside world. Let's take a look at how to extend UrlDisp to handle database access.

Wrapping UrlDisp around a ReaderT will do the trick:

{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances, ScopedTypeVariables #-}
import Network.UrlDisp
import Database.HDBC
import Database.HDBC.ODBC
import Control.Exception (bracket)
import Network.CGI
import Network.CGI.Monad

instance MonadCGI (ReaderT Connection (CGIT IO)) where
    cgiAddHeader n v = lift $ cgiAddHeader n v
    cgiGet = lift . cgiGet

-- once a request to "/db/" is sent,
-- execute an SQL query and show its results
main :: IO ()
main = bracket (connectODBC connStr) disconnect
    (\c -> runCGI $ (flip runReaderT) c $ evalUrlDisp $
        ((h |/ "db" *> m) <|> output "not found"))

m :: UrlDisp (ReaderT Connection (CGIT IO)) CGIResult
m = do
    v <- lift ask >>= \c -> liftIO (quickQuery' c queryText [])
    output $ show v

-- you will have to provide this one
queryText = "select * from ..."