Passing a period as part of an id in show action

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am trying to do the following in a RESTful manner:

I have a web service that accepts an id to deliver a particular record. Unfortunately, the id that the client will have is not the usual database sequence number. This mostly works, though, and the url looks something like:

http://myservice.com/controller/the_id.xml

That is handled by the "show" action.

Unfortunately, some of the ids that will be passed contain special characters. I can require that they be encrypted, but the period seems to be having a problem. In other words, if the id is "the+id. value", the url should be:

http://myservice.com/controller/the%2Bid.+value.xml

where the plus, period and space are transformed. This works for the plus and space, but the period causes the rest of url to be considered the "format" parameter.

Actually, mostly.

I've tried on two different servers, running the same version of rails. One accepts the above url and one doesn't.

I've tried to figure out what is different about the servers. Could this be caused by an Apache configuration difference? Or a Passenger difference? I could use a hint about where the transformation of the %2e to period takes place.

2

Can you change your route, rather than   controller/id.format can you have:   controller/id/format This way it wouldn't matter if there are full stops in the id (although slashes may become a problem :slight_smile:

3

I am trying to do the following in a RESTful manner:

http://myservice.com/controller/the%2Bid.+value.xml

the period causes the rest of url to be considered the "format" parameter.

Can you change your route, rather than controller/id.format can you have: controller/id/format This way it wouldn't matter if there are full stops in the id (although slashes may become a problem :slight_smile:

Or tell Rails periods are okay... using a regex... something like...

:requirements => { :id => %r([\w.]+) }

4

Thanks for the suggestions. I decided to just go the easy way and have that one entry point not be RESTful. It will look like:

http://myservice.com/controller/get?uri=XXXX

and:

http://myservice.com/controller/get.xml?uri=XXXX