So, in my quest to get Rails routes to accept routes like:

articles/:comment[article]/comments/:comment[id]

I’ve been playing with parsers for the first time in my programming career. Quite how I’ve managed to get this far without them I leave as an exercise for the interested reader.

At the moment I have a parser that will parse

articles/2007/05/12/slug

and give back an ActionSelector that yamlizes as

--- !ruby/object:ActionSelector
  controller: articles
  action: show
  params:
    :article:
      :year: 2007
      :month: 05
      :mday: 12
      :slug: slug

For my next trick, I need refactor the parser I have so that it’s generated via a set of parser builders. Then I need to write a parser for routing specifiers that can use those builders to build a URL parser.

It’s a simple matter of programming I tell you.

Updates

RouteBuilder works (2007041608:00ish)

I now have a RouteBuilder that generates routes and has the same interface as ActionController::Routing::RouteBuilder.

My Route doesn’t have the same interface as AC::Routing::Route yet, but it’s not far off. The fun part is working out which bits of the interface are essential and which can be safely ignored. I’m hoping that I won’t have to rewrite AC::Routing::RouteSet as well, but I’m not sure how complicit it is with the innards of AC::Route.

Routes can generate paths from options (2007041612:30)

context "Given a default route" do
setup do
@route = RouteBuilder.new.build('/:controller/:action/:id')
end

def gen(hash)
\# Rails interface is a bit surprising
@route.generate(hash.dup, hash.dup, {})
end

specify "generation works" do
gen(:controller => 'accounts', :action => 'show', :id => 1) \\
.should == '/accounts/show/1'

gen(:controller => 'accounts', :id => 1) \\
.should == '/accounts/index/1'

gen(:controller => 'accounts', :action => ':index') \\
.should == '/accounts'
end
end


It's nowhere near complete, but I'm being gung ho and starting to integrate my RouteBuilder with Rails. Then I can start pulling the Rails routing tests into my own test suite and get some confidence with its robustness before I start adding the ability to handle routes like `/books/:tune[book][id]/tunes/:tune[id]`, which is why I started this in the first place.

With any luck and some good train hacking time on the way to London I should have something good to show at LRUG this evening.