Routes limitations : trailing / and more dynamic rules

Rails
1

Hello all,

I’ve two limitations in rails routes for which I don’t find a solution.

  1. how to distinguish /hello/ from /hello ?
    Rails routes seem not use nor validate the trailing slash. routes
    ‘hello’ and ‘hello/’ both validates urls ‘/hello’ and ‘/hello/’

  2. how to have a dynamic ‘internal’ part in the url ?
    I would like to match everithing like %r{/.ht} so that the following
    routes are catch : /.htaccess /.htusers
    /hello/foo/barunlimited/number/of/path/.htaccess
    (I know that apache is already forbidding this ones, it is only an
    example)
    Rails routes let me write ‘:special_with_regexp/*path_info’ but not
    ‘*path_info/:special_with_regexp’. Is there a way to do that ?
    It seems I can’t even do a regexp requirement on the *path_info to check
    all this by hand (at least I didn’t manage to do it).

From what I see rails routes as pretty limited. Is there a way to
resolve my two needs ? If not, is there at least a (simple) way to take
hand on routes to do ‘by hands regexp’ on the full url ?
It seems that rails routes are more restricted and not very simpliers
than plain regexp for my personnal needs.

And … maybe two ideas for feature request :

  1. It would be cool if a could chain some routes. Say that “ok, url
    begin with /hello so put it in pipe A to finish dispatching”, “this one
    is not /hello but /foo, so finish dispatching with pipe B”. Something
    like sub-route.
    something like :
    map.connect_with_submap ‘hello/*path_info’ { |sub|
    sub.connect ‘foo/:controller/:action’, … # to check url
    /hello/foo/…
    sub.connect ‘bar/:controller/:action’, … # to check url
    /hello/bar/…
    }

  2. I would be very convenient to be able to add a block to do
    additionnal checks by hands if the regexp is ok. Maybe something like :

validates only if :id is a multiple of 2

map.connect ‘:controller/:action/:id’,
:requirements => {:id => /\d+/}} ,
{ |request, params| 0 == id % 2 }

Thanks in advance for any reply or idea.

–
Eric D.