Re: How do I create friendlier URLS?

[rkrieger]

Granted, I'm suggesting something else than CGI::Application about which I know little. I do not know the scope or size of what you already have running, so YMMV.

You could look into HTML::Mason and its concept of dhandlers and autohandlers.

Using a dhandler, you can use the URLs of the form you indicated, while passing parameters with those URLs to a single script/component. For example: a URL of the form http://example.com/archives/753/pdf only requires a suitable dhandler in /archives/ that obtains the document with ID 753 and displays the PDF file stored for it.

Update: Added simple day-to-day example

[blogical]

I especially enjoy this aspect of Mason. Not the reason I'm using it, and I'm not sure the overhead would be worth it for just this feature, but it's worth a look.

Mason does this by jumping in and handling certain URLs, then parsing them to try and find the best match for the request. No need to state parameters explicitly with a ? or reveal the handler's name in the URL. It can even be configured in a local .htaccess file if you're working with apache in an environment where you don't have access to the httpd.conf.

Assuming apache, here's an example .htaccess:

order allow,deny
allow from all

Options -Indexes -ExecCGI

#Server root relevant path to handler script
Action my-handler /test/my_handler.pl

SetHandler my-handler

AddHandler default-handler .html .gif .jpg .png

<FilesMatch "my_handler.pl$">
 Options +ExecCGI
 SetHandler cgi-script
</FilesMatch>

And an example my_handler.pl- not very useful as is, but dispatch with your new parameters as you like:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

print "<p>Request_URI contained: " . join( ' ', map {"[$_]"} split '/'
+, $ENV{REQUEST_URI}) . "</p>\n"; 
print "$_ => $ENV{$_}<br />\n" for sort keys %ENV;

Don't forget that the parameters will be encoded...