Mmm... parsers

Written by Piers Cawley on

So, in my quest to get Rails routes to accept routes like: articles/:comment[article]/comments/:comment[id] I’ve been playing with parsers for the first time in my programming career. Quite how I’ve managed to get this far without them I leave as an exercise for the interested reader. At the moment I have a parser that will parse articles/2007/05/12/slug and give back an ActionSelector that yamlizes as — !ruby/object:ActionSelector controller: articles action: show params: :article: :year: 2007 :month: 05 :mday: 12 :slug: slug Which can be easily turned into the kind of params hash that rails wants from its routing system in order to dispatch the request to the right place.

So, in my quest to get Rails routes to accept routes like:

articles/:comment[article]/comments/:comment[id]

I’ve been playing with parsers for the first time in my programming career. Quite how I’ve managed to get this far without them I leave as an exercise for the interested reader.

At the moment I have a parser that will parse

articles/2007/05/12/slug

and give back an ActionSelector that yamlizes as

--- !ruby/object:ActionSelector
  controller: articles
  action: show
  params:
    :article:
      :year: 2007
      :month: 05
      :mday: 12
      :slug: slug
Which can be easily turned into the kind of params hash that rails wants from its routing system in order to dispatch the request to the right place.

For my next trick, I need refactor the parser I have so that it’s generated via a set of parser builders. Then I need to write a parser for routing specifiers that can use those builders to build a URL parser.

It’s a simple matter of programming I tell you.

Updates

RouteBuilder works (2007041608:00ish)

I now have a RouteBuilder that generates routes and has the same interface as ActionController::Routing::RouteBuilder.

My Route doesn’t have the same interface as AC::Routing::Route yet, but it’s not far off. The fun part is working out which bits of the interface are essential and which can be safely ignored. I’m hoping that I won’t have to rewrite AC::Routing::RouteSet as well, but I’m not sure how complicit it is with the innards of AC::Route.

Routes can generate paths from options (2007041612:30)

context "Given a default route" do
setup do
@route = RouteBuilder.new.build('/:controller/:action/:id')
end

def gen(hash)
\# Rails interface is a bit surprising
@route.generate(hash.dup, hash.dup, {})
end

specify "generation works" do
gen(:controller => 'accounts', :action => 'show', :id => 1) \\
.should == '/accounts/show/1'

gen(:controller => 'accounts', :id => 1) \\
.should == '/accounts/index/1'

gen(:controller => 'accounts', :action => ':index') \\
.should == '/accounts'
end
end


It's nowhere near complete, but I'm being gung ho and starting to integrate my RouteBuilder with Rails. Then I can start pulling the Rails routing tests into my own test suite and get some confidence with its robustness before I start adding the ability to handle routes like `/books/:tune[book][id]/tunes/:tune[id]`, which is why I started this in the first place.

With any luck and some good train hacking time on the way to London I should have something good to show at LRUG this evening.

    
  • 0 likes
  • 0 reposts
  • 0 replies
  • 0 mentions