[Zope3-dev] Re: Apache rewrite rules and URLs: an experiment

[Peter Mayne]

Jim Fulton wrote:
> You can then use the absolute url view to get its url. You can then
> generate site-relative urls from that.

Ah. So in my .pt I can use

       <tal:block define="
         zach python:modules['zope.app.component.hooks'];
         zc python:modules['zope.component']"
       >
         <span tal:replace="python:zc.getView(zach.getSite(), 
'absolute_url', request)"/>
       </tal:block>

vs

     <span tal:replace="python:request.getApplicationURL()"/>

to come up with exactly the same thing. Why would I use getSite again? ;-)

If I try the above <tal:block> when I access Zope directly, it works. 
However, if I access it via Apache, I get:

...
   File "C:\opt\Python23\Lib\site-packages\zope\tal\talinterpreter.py", 
line 451, in do_insertText_tal
     text = self.engine.evaluateText(stuff[0])
   File 
"C:\opt\Python23\Lib\site-packages\zope\app\pagetemplate\engine.py", 
line 105, in evaluateText
     return unicode(text)
   File 
"C:\opt\Python23\Lib\site-packages\zope\app\traversing\browser\absoluteur
l.py", line 101, in __unicode__
     return urllib.unquote(self.__str__()).decode('utf-8')
AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'decode'

I'm not even going to think about why this is happening.

So, I'm going to stick with my original tried and true rules for linking 
within the application:

- Use relative URLs where possible.
- Where an absolute URL (starting with "/") is required, use
   "request.getApplicationURL(path_only=True)" to build it.
- Don't use URLs that start with "http://host", because it breaks local
   copies of the page. Unfortunately, all of the Zopeish ways of
   generating URLs that I've seen so far break this rule.

(An example of building an absolute URL:

     <a tal:attributes="href 
python:'%s/sitemap.html'%request.getApplicationURL(path_only=True)">
       Site Map
     </a>
)

If anyone can come up with some better rules, I'd love to hear them.

Stephan, I think it would be highly useful to mention at least the first 
two rules in chapter 4: if people hardcode the wrong URLs, their 
applications will break when they first start testing behind Apache.

PJDM
-- 
Peter Mayne
Spherion Technology Solutions
Canberra, ACT, Australia
"I'm after rebellion, I'll settle for lies" - Blue Oyster Cult