WebStack

Annotated docs/paths.html

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2005-04-26 paulb file changeset files shortlog [project @ 2005-04-26 18:33:06 by paulb] Improved URL and path documentation, adding new documents to make the material more readable.
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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
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<head>
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  <title>URLs and Paths</title>
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  <meta name="generator"
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 content="amaya 8.1a, see http://www.w3.org/Amaya/" />
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  <link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
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</head>
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<body>
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<h1>URLs and Paths</h1>
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<p>The URL at which your application shall appear is arguably the first
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part
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of the application's user interface that any user will see. Remember
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that a user of your application does not have to be a real person; in
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fact,
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a user can be any of the following things:</p>
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<ul>
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  <li>A real person entering the URL into a browser's address bar.</li>
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  <li>A real person linking to your application by writing the URL in a
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separate Web page.</li>
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  <li>A program which has the URL defined within it and which may
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manipulate the URL to perform certain kinds of operations.</li>
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</ul>
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<p>Some application developers have a fairly rigid view of what kind of
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information a URL should contain and how it should be structured. In
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this guide, we shall look at a number of different approaches.</p>
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<h2>Interpreting Path Information</h2>
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<p>What the URL is supposed to do is to say where (on the Internet or
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on an
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intranet) your application resides and which resource or service is
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being
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accessed, and these look like this:</p>
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<pre>http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/WebStack.html</pre>
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<p>In an application the full URL, containing the address of the
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machine on which it is running, is not always interesting. In the
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WebStack API (and in other Web programming frameworks), we also talk
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about "paths" - a path is&nbsp;just the part of the
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URL which refers to the resource or service, ignoring the actual
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Internet
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address, and so the above example would have a path which looks like
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this:</p>
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<pre>/python/WebStack.html</pre>
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<p>When writing a Web application, most of the time you just need to
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concentrate on the path because the address doesn't usually tell you
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anything
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you don't already know. What you need to do is to interpret the path
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specified in the request in order to work out which resource or service
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the user is trying to access.</p>
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<div class="WebStack">
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<h3>WebStack API - Path Methods in Transaction Objects</h3>
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<p>WebStack provides the following transaction methods for inspecting
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path
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information:</p>
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<dl>
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  <dt><code>get_path</code></dt>
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  <dd>This gets the entire path of a resource including parameter
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information (as described in <a href="parameters.html">"Request
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Parameters and Uploads"</a>).</dd>
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  <dt><code>get_path_without_query</code></dt>
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  <dd>This gets the entire path of a resource but without any parameter
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information.</dd>
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</dl>
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</div>
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<h2>Query Strings</h2>
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<p>Sometimes, a "query string" will be provided as part of a URL; for
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example:</p>
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<pre>http://www.boddie.org.uk/application?param1=value1</pre>
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<p>The question mark character marks the beginning of the query string
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which
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contains encoded parameter information; such information and its
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inspection
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is discussed in <a href="parameters.html">"Request Parameters and
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Uploads"</a>.</p>
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<h2>More About Paths</h2>
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<ul>
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  <li><a href="path-info.html">Paths To and Within Applications</a></li>
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  <li><a href="path-design.html">Path Design and Interpretation</a></li>
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  <li><a href="path-info-support.html">Path Info Support in Server
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Environments</a></li>
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</ul>
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</body>
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</html>