Question

Background:

I’m using a CRUD framework in Catalyst that auto-generates forms and lists for all tables in a given database. For example:
/admin/list/person or /admin/add/person or /admin/edit/person/3 all dynamically generate pages or forms as appropriate for the table ‘person’. (In other words, Admin.pm has actions edit, list, add, delete and so on that expect a table argument and possibly a row-identifying argument.)

Question:

In the particular application I’m building, the database will be used by multiple customers, so I want to introduce a URI scheme where the first element is the customer’s identifier, followed by the administrative action/table etc:

• /cust1/admin/list/person
• /cust2/admin/add/person
• /cust2/admin/edit/person/3

This is for “branding” purposes, and also to ensure that bookmarks or URLs passed from one user to another do the expected thing.

But I’m having a lot of trouble getting this to work. I would prefer not to have to modify the subs in the existing framework, so I’ve been trying variations on the following:

sub customer : Regex('^(\w+)/(admin)$') {
    my ($self, $c, @args) = @_;
    #validation of captured arg snipped..
    my $path = join('/', 'admin', @args);
    $c->request->path($path);
    $c->dispatcher->prepare_action($c);
    $c->forward($c->action, $c->req->args);
}

But it just will not behave. I’ve used regex matching actions many times, but putting one in the very first ‘barrel’ of a URI seems unusually traumatic. Any suggestions gratefully received.

Answer 1

Make the customer action :Chained and then chain the admin action to that one. For example:

sub customer :Chained('/') :PathPart('') :CaptureArgs(1) {
    # load current customer into the stash
}

sub admin :Chained('customer') :PathPart('admin') :Args(0) {
}

For more information see the Catalyst::DispatchType::Chained