I've suspended my changes in light of Ben's new API, which is now partly implemented.

I don't understand what exactly minimization means, and how eliminating it changes Routes. Section 3.1 of the manual says:

1 m.connect(':controller/:action/:id', action='view', id=4) 2 3 # Will match all of the following 4 # /content/view/4 5 # /content/view 6 # /content

Does this mean that using the new map.dynamic(), only /content/view/4 will match? What if I want the others to match too, specifically in the case of "/foo" vs "/foo/" vs "/foo/index"?

Does this clear up the problem of matching nonsense routes like "/archives/view-" (missing ID), or will we still have to handle this the same way?

Will 'action' and 'id' continue to be implicit arguments, or will they have to be specified in every route?

What about on the generation side? I gather that minimization is what makes url_for("name") choose the wrong route. But what is its other impact? Routes 1 would leave out variables in the URL if the defaults would match the same route?

On Nov 23, 2007 3:34 PM, Ben Bangert
<ben-...@public.gmane.org> wrote:

Routes decouples the URLs from the actions. This allows you to rename or move actions without affecting the URLs, or conversely to reorganize the URLs without changing your controllers.

Named routes decouple the actions from the templates. Otherwise you're hardwiring the names of controllers and actions in your templates and wherever else url_for is called, and if you move actions around you have to change your templates. That's a violation of MVC, tying the templates to a specific controller implementation. Better to give the routes meaningful logical names and arguments. For instance, I want to show incident 23:

url_for("incident", incident_id=23, printable=1)

url_for(controller="main", action="incident", id=23, printable=1) # Oops, I want to move it to controller "incident" action "index".

url_for("/incident", incident_id=23, printable=1) # Oops, I want to change the URL.