Sinatra Dynamic URLs

[?mellow guitar music?] 0:00 [Think Vitamin Membership - Est. 2010] [membership.thinkvitamin.com] 0:03 [Ruby - Sinatra Dynamic URLs with Jim Hoskins] 0:07 In the previous video, we saw how to embed variables into our url's. 0:13 Now we're going to take a look at how to create more dynamic url's in Sinatra. 0:16 In the last video, we saw how to create dynamic url's by adding variables 0:20 into the route names. 0:24 Like in this example here, we have /blog/post/ 0:25 :with the variable id embedded into the url. 0:28 Then we're able to access that through the params (:id) object. 0:32 In this case, we're just looking up the post by the id and returning it. 0:36 But sometimes the dynamic portions of our urls are a little more complicated 0:40 than can be handled with a simple pattern like this. 0:44 That's where splats come in handy. 0:47 To use a splat in a url, you simply use an asterisk. 0:49 So let's create the most generic url that we can. 0:53 We'll do get, and we'll do a forward slash and then we'll put a splat or an asterisk /* 0:56 and then we'll define our block. 1:02 Now, when the asterisk is used in a route, 1:05 what it does is it basically catches everything, including letters, numbers, 1:08 slashes, or really any character. 1:12 It's saying "Whatever it is, we'll accept that route." 1:14 So by doing a slash and a star /* 1:17 we're saying that literally any route that comes through would match this pattern. 1:19 We can actually get the value of the dynamic part of the url 1:23 that is caught by the splat by loading params splat. 1:27 So we can inspect it by loading up params and we'll put [:splat] 1:30 and just so we can see it in our browser, I'm going to call the .inspect method 1:37 and what inspect does in Ruby is any object should have the inspect method 1:42 and when you call it, it will return a human-readable form of that object. 1:46 So when we flip over to our code, and let's just type in something completely random, 1:51 so let's just say random. 1:56 We'll see that the splat parameter is an array with the string ['random']. 1:59 So let's put some other parts on here-- more/stuff, 2:04 and we'll click okay. 2:10 And so we can see that everything--including the slashes 2:12 and all the different parts--are caught into this one string inside of this array. 2:15 So from there, we could break that apart or inspect it, or try to match it 2:19 using any other more advanced type of matching 2:23 to figure out what to do with this url. 2:25 Now, you'll notice that it's not just a string--it's an array with a string in it, 2:29 and that's because you could have multiple splats inside of your url. 2:33 So for instance, if we had a /* and then maybe something like /static/ 2:36 and then another /splat. 2:43 What this would do is it would match any route with anything, 2:46 so long as /static/ appeared somewhre in it. 2:49 So if we modify our url to have /static/some/more/stuff, 2:52 we'll see that it broke up our url around this /static/ part 3:03 because it already matched it, so our first splat is random/more/stuff 3:07 and then part 2 is some/more/stuff. 3:12 So you can have multiple splats around pieces of static parts of your url. 3:14 I'm going to go ahead and just comment this out, 3:19 and let's look at how this might be used. 3:23 So for instance we have this get/blog/post/id 3:25 and any url for a post should just have this one variable here. 3:29 But let's say I don't find the correct post based on that id, 3:34 we want to show a special page, maybe showing similar posts 3:37 or guessing at what posts they would want. 3:41 Well, in Sinatra, you can actually have multiple routes 3:43 that would match these same urls. 3:46 So for example, we could write this route: 3:48 get "/blog/post and then put our splat to match anything that's like blog/post. 3:50 And then, we'll create our block, 3:56 and let's just paste in this string here. 3:58 and say "We couldn't find, and then just print out the splat. 4:01 Obviously, you would want to do something a little more useful than that. 4:05 So how would we actually get this to trigger? 4:08 Well, when it receives the request, it will go down all the routes in order 4:11 and try to match it. 4:13 So if we gave it the url /blog/post/foo, 4:15 it would first try this route and then it would actually execute it, 4:22 so let's say params[:id] would be foo. 4:28 And in our find/post/ method if our slug here is foo, then we return this content here. 4:31 Otherwise it will return nil. 4:38 Now, let's say that we passed in something else, like /not/a/real/post. 4:41 In this case, it wouldn't match this url because it has multiple slashes 4:49 and the id wouldn't actually be acceptable for that, 4:53 but it would for this url, since it's a splat. 4:56 But let's say instead of an unrealistic url, we gave it bar, 4:59 which is a perfectly acceptable url by this pattern, but it may not exist. 5:04 So in this case what we can do is use a special method called pass() 5:09 and what pass will do is say that this route 5:14 is not the correct route for these circumstances, 5:17 and it will actually stop execution right when it's called 5:20 and then it will start looking for any other routes that would match. 5:23 So if we called pass() right here, 5:27 it would always just pass down to this next one, 5:29 so we want to put some conditional logic on it. 5:31 So in this case, we're going to say pass unless/ @post 5:33 and unless is just like "if" but the opposite of it, so the pass will execute 5:37 if post is false or nil or some other falsey value. 5:43 So in this case if we nip pass/bar, @ post will be nil and pass will be called, 5:47 and all this code down here--line 13--would be skipped and we look for the next url. 5:56 So let's try that out. 6:00 So let's go to /blog/post/foo, 6:02 and we could see our post content. 6:07 But if we go instead to /blog/post/bar, 6:09 you could see we couldn't find bar. 6:14 so if we have multiple slashes, like baz, the splat will actually pick it up. 6:17 So the splat helps us in this case 6:24 in that we can actually handle urls much more dynamically. 6:25 In the next video, 6:28 we'll take a look at handling 404 and other special cases in Sinatra. 6:29 [?mellow guitar music?] 6:34 [Think Vitamin Membership - Est. 2010] [membership.thinkvitamin.com] 6:36

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