Currently, Django uses URLs based on regular expressions. I think that
is a suboptimal way to go about things because:
- Regular expressions are ugly and can be difficult to write.
- Regular expressions don't provide an easy way to match certain types
of fields, like slugs or month names.
- Regular expressions are difficult to reverse. (According to the
docs, regular expressions using a | to separate multiple possibilities
are irreversible.)
My proposal is to add a URL resolution system on top of the current
one [for backwards compatibility] that works in a similar way to
Werkzeug's URL resolver. You express URL patterns in a syntax like '/
<slug:slug>/' (where the first 'slug' is a converter and the second
'slug' is the name to be passed), which is then converted into a
regular expression to match URLs ('/(?P<slug>[A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/'), and a
format string ('/%(slug)s/'). When resolving, the regular expression
is matched against the URL, and when reversing, the variables are
validated and then substituted into the format string. There would
probably be converters for 'string', 'slug', 'number', 'monthname',
etc. The advantages of this system are:
- It makes the URL patterns cleaner and easier to write in the
URLconf.
- It improves the accuracy of reversing, because you don't have to
scan a regex to find out what to reverse.
- It can be made backwards-compatible with the old system, possibly by
using a 'Pattern()' function/class to generate a new-style pattern and
having the 'patterns()' function use the current behavior for tuples
or RegexURLPattern instances.
Sorry to propose this right up against the voting deadline for 1.2
features, but it's one of the things that has always bugged me about
Django and I would really like to see this in 1.2.
-- LeafStorm
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