URL generation

[aturon]

We need a story for generating URLs in code, given values for various parameters. One possibility would be to use named routes, like Actix does.

Let's discuss possible designs here, before implementing.

[Keats]

Copying my comment from internals:

Let’s say you have the following routes:

order-details: /orders/{id}
checkout: /checkout

and imagine you want to redirect the user after a POST on the checkout route to its order page with the newly created order ID. In Django you would redirect to the URL given by reverse("order-details", kwargs={'id': order.id}).

This requires 2 things (well 3, I’ll expand on the last one a bit later):

• named routes: if I change a URL, I only want to change it at one place, not everywhere
• named parameters: we could potentially skip that but it avoids tons of bugs and improve readability so that would be sad to not have them

The last point that would be nice, providing we have named routes is namespaces. It has been mentioned before as subrouters providing some routes.

If I do router.mount("/auth", "auth", &auth_urls) with the parameters being (prefix, namespace, router), I should be able to redirect to /auth/login by doing reverse("auth:login") for example if we follow the Django example and there is a view named login in the auth subrouter.

The Django docs for that bit are in https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/ref/urlresolvers/#reverse
I have used various frameworks in different languages but haven't seen much better than that. I believe Rails is very similar but don't quote me on that.

[bIgBV]

These are just some thoughts mentioned during the issue triage:

• The primary issue is providing a way to leverage the compiler to generate URLs, instead of a stringly typed scheme
• One such approach could be to use the endpoint itself as a key to generate the URL, something along the lines of router.get_url(&endpoint_fn)
• This would piggyback on the way the modules are set up in the user's application

For now, me and @aturon will be doing a survey of the larger web ecosystem to see how this problem is solved and then outline a general approach for tide.

[yoshuawuyts]

Note from triage: we're not sure this necessarily matches well with Rust. We're not sure how to proceed with this and how useful this is, so making a decision to close this for now.