> > The web2py book and documentation has led me to believe that the following > would work; > > http://120.0.0.1/myapp/default/somefunction can be written as > http://120.0.0.1/myapp/somefunction but I get invalid request error >
Here's what the book says: web2py maps a URL of the form: 1. http://127.0.0.1:8000/a/c/f.html to the function f() in controller "c.py" in application "a". If f is not present, web2py defaults to the indexcontroller function. If c is not present, web2py defaults to the "default.py" controller, and if a is not present, web2py defaults to the init application. If there is no init application, web2py tries to run the welcomeapplication. I think I see the confusion. It says if the controller is not present, web2py defaults to the default.py controller. However, when you have the URL /myapp/somefunction, technically the controller is present, as web2py will interpret the second element of the URL as the controller (just because you know somefunction is a function doesn't mean the default router does) -- in that case, it's actually the function that is missing, not the controller. So, what the above really means is: /myapp maps to /myapp/default/index /myapp/default maps to /myapp/default/index but /myapp/somefunction does not map to /myapp/default/somefunction because somefunction is interpreted as a controller in that URL (instead, it maps to /myapp/somefunction/index, and you get an error because such a controller doesn't exist). > If I then overwrite routes.py using routes.example.py, the above case no > longer works. Looking at both routes.example.py and router.example.py, it > looks like both of them configure web2py's routing behavior in the same > way, but the actual behavior is not the same. > I assume you're referring to the default_controller='default' parameter set in the routes.example.py example. I agree that's a little confusing because you might expect it to work much like setting the default controller in the parameter-based system, but again, let's look at what the book says: When using the pattern-based system, the name of the default application, controller, and function can be changed from *init*, *default*, and *index* respectively to another name by setting the appropriate value in routes.py That's saying that setting the value of default_controller merely changes the default value used by the standard routing system when that item is missing from the URL. So, let's say you set default_controller='mycontroller'. In that case, /myapp would map to /myapp/mycontroller/index instead of /myapp/default/index, but /myapp/somefunction would still cause a problem because somefunction would be seen as a controller. One thing to note is that the parameter-based system was created quite a while after the pattern-based system, so seemingly similar functionality wasn't necessarily designed to behave the same way (hopefully the behavior of the parameter-based system is seen as an improvement in this case). Anyway, I agree some of this could be better explained in the book. Anthony
