Ticket #2 (defect)

After some discussion on cherrypy-devel, we're considering making this a configuration option.

See #4 for a patch that fixes this.

Should URIs with virtual path parameters have a trailing slash?

My patch strips trailing slashes from such URLs, because I thought the most common case would be someting like /user/12, where "12" logically represents a file, or a leaf in the tree.

But what should happen when we have urls such as /articles/2004/, which returns a list of articles from the given year? Is this an index/folder? Should it have a trailing slash? If so, how do we distinguish between the former and the latter case?

Perhaps we could add a trailing slash when the list of parameters is incomplete. For example:

class Articles:
    def default(self, year, month=None, day=None, number=None):
        ...

Given the previous method definition, these are the possible valid urls:

/articles/2004/
/articles/2004/12/
/articles/2004/12/5/
/articles/2004/12/5/2

I've posted an updated patch which implements the behavior I've just described in #4.

There are a couple open issues with my latest implementation.

class A:
    def b(self, c=None):
        ...

In this case, b is a method, hence it will not have a trailing slash in the url (/a/b). But b allows a virtual path parameter (/a/b/45), so it's logically not a leaf, but an index... should it have a trailing slash when the parameter is unspecified?

class Articles:
    # colorScheme is meant as a query string parameter
    def default(self, year, month=None, day=None, number=None, colorScheme=1):
        ...

If a method is defined as in this example, the URL of an article will have a trailing slash (/2004/12/5/3/), though it problably should not.

A workaround is to define the method thus:

    def default(self, year, month=None, day=None, number=None, **parameters):
        ...

Personally I like this better because it creates a cleaner distinction between normal parameters and query string arguments.