How can I change how single element paths are handled in Seaside?

Question

Seaside by default points example.com/myapp to whatever application is registered at myapp. I'd like to have a core application that can also handle these links, or some other way of handling these links.

So far, I have a home application that is also registered as the default application, so http://mydomain.com will resolve to it, but if I generate a link, like http://mydomain.com/more-info, Seaside tries to resolve an application registered at more-info. What if I want my home application to handle the link? Or handle it in some other way?

I'm hosting Seaside with Apache, so I could use Apache's URL rewriting engine to rewrite http://mydomain.com/more-info to http://mydomain.com/home/more-info, which would be handled by my home app.

Is there a better way to do this? Also, if a link exists to an explanation of the Seaside request/response lifecycle, that'd be sweet.

Answer 1

What you are trying to do is not common practice in Seaside applications. If you want to generate a link from one page to another page in your application, you generally use a callback attached to an anchor:

html anchor callback: [ self call: moreInfoComponent]

In such cases, you do not care about how the url looks like and Seaside generates the url for you. Such generated urls never have a nested structure but use parameters.

More information on the Seaside request/response cycle can be found in the online book (chapters "Fundamentals" and "Sequencing Components").

However, if you indeed want to have such a nested url (to make urls bookmarkable), there are different approaches, depending on what you actually want to achieve. You can either take a look at the approach for handling expired sessions (in the book) or at the Seaside-REST package.

Btw, the mapping of urls to applications happens through (instances of) WADispatcher. If you inspect the result of the following expression, you can see the dispatcher tree of Seaside. It's entirely customizable by adding new applications, dispatchers, etc...

WAAdmin defaultServerManager adaptors first requestHandler

Hope this helps you on your way...