I need to declare a route that could treat two kinds of requests:
GET /api/vote/:value
GET /api/vote/:value/:date
The way I treat the data is not that different in both cases, so I would like them to be defined in the same place.
What I did for now is that I used a wilcard placeholder :
use Mojolicious::Lite -signatures;
use DateTime;
get '/vote/*values' => sub ($c) {
my $datetime = DateTime->now;
# Then we process the route parameters
my @params = split('/', $c->param('values'), 2);
# Optional if no date provided in the route
if ( defined $params[1] ) {
my @dates_params = split('-', $params[1], 3);
my %datetime = (
year => $dates_params[0],
month => $dates_params[1],
day => $dates_params[2],
);
$datetime = DateTime->new(%datetime);
}
my %vote = (
value => $params[0],
datetime => $datetime,
);
# ... More code here
$c->render(json => $data);
}
It works fine this way, but I don't feel very comfortable with this solution because it is not very explicit nor readable, and I know other frameworks allows the possibility of doing something similar in a way that seems more satisfactory.
E.g., the following, using the Express.js routing capabilities, allows to reach /vote/123
and /vote/123/2019-01-13
in only one route declaration.
router.get('/vote/:value/:date*?', function(req, res, next) {
// Processing here...
res.json(// etc.);
});
Note: this example comes from this SO question.
After trying various possibilities with Mojolicious::Lite
, I found out regular expressions in Mojolicious routes are not a thing and the best solution I found was the wildcard placeholder. Am I missing something?
% mojo generate lite_app optional
...
% $EDITOR optional
One could mark the date as optional by giving it a default value of undef
:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Mojolicious::Lite -signatures;
get '/vote/:value/*when' => { when => undef } => sub ($c) {
my $value = $c->stash('value');
my $when = $c->stash('when');
$c->render(
format => 'txt',
text => $value . ' ' . ( defined $when ? $when : 'nope' ) . "\n"
);
};
app->start;
which then allows with-or-without the date queries:
% ./optional get /vote/42 2>/dev/null
42 nope
% ./optional get /vote/42/2020/01/07 2>/dev/null
42 2020/01/07
%