[tbnl-devel] New macro: create-groups-bind-regex-dispatcher

27 Aug 2005

      Hello,

first of all, congratulations for TBNL :-)

Here's a small macro (with a big ugly name) for TBNL, that allows to
bind portions of a request URI to arguments passed to dispatch
functions. (see attachment)

I'm using it to create RESTful [1] URIs and web APIs for a web
application I'm playing with.  For example, let's say I want to publish
a news archive.  The "usual" way for accessing the news for August 27th,
2005 would be an URI like:

    http://www.news.tld/archive?year=2005&month=08&day=27

The proposed add-on allows to easily (well, actually *more* easily)
manage URIs like this:

    http://www.news.tld/archive/2005/08/27/

The task is performed by a macro called
create-groups-bind-regex-dispatcher, which takes three arguments:

    1. a CL-PPCRE regex (a string, an s-expression or a scanner)
       with one or more register groups.  It will be matched against
       the request URI;

    2. a list of variable names that will be bound to the register
       groups above iff the regex matches;

    3. a dispatch function that accepts keyword arguments named like
       the variables above.

A code sample for the news archive:
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(defun archive-page (&key year month day)
  "Archive page"
  (format nil "Year: ~A; Month: ~A; Day: ~A" year month day))

(setq *dispatch-table*
      (list
        (create-groups-bind-regex-dispatcher
	   "^\\/archive\\/(\\d{4})\\/(\\d{1,2})\\/(\\d{1,2})\\/?$"
	   (year month day) archive-page)
        #'default-dispatcher))
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Under the hood, the list of variables provided to
create-groups-bind-regex-dispatcher is used with
cl-ppcre:register-groups-bind --- so you can apply some voodoo to the
matched variables:
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(defun archive-page (&key year month day)
  "Archive page with integer keyword parameters"
  (format nil "(+ year month day) => ~D" (+ year month day)))

(setq *dispatch-table*
      (list
        (create-groups-bind-regex-dispatcher
	   "^\\/archive\\/(\\d{4})\\/(\\d{1,2})\\/(\\d{1,2})\\/?$"
	   ((#'parse-integer year month day)) archive-page)
        #'default-dispatcher))
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That's all.  I hope it will be useful for you as well...

Comments are welcome (please don't be too rude, it's one of my first
attempts with CL :-)

Regards,

alceste

  References:
    [1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
-- 
Alceste Scalas <alceste.scalas@gmx.net>