Can I use regular expressions in my routes?

[Dan Q]

Hi all. I'm new to Phoenix and Elixir, and I've spent the morning scouring documentation and source and doing experiments, but I'm completely stuck. What I'd like to be able to do is to set conditions that apply to my routes, ideally using regular expressions. 

What I'd like to be able to do is something like this:

get "/:id", SomeController, :show where Regex.match?(~r/^\d{5}$/, id)
get "/:id", OtherController, :show where Regex.match?(~r/^A\d{4}$/, id)

That is - where a named component of the URL matches a regular expression, that route is used. In Rails, my regular framework, this would be expressed as:

get '/:id', to: 'some#show', id: /\d{5}/
get '/:id', to: 'other#show', id: /A\d{4}/

But I can't find a Phoenix (well, Plug) equivalent, and my Elixir's still a little weak for me to know where to get started writing my own.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

[Chris McCord]

The answer, when in doubt, is almost always "use a plug!" :)

You can't match on regex in a route like Rails because it is extremely slow. It would cause us to have to walk the routes on every request and test one-by-one. Instead, we optimism for the 95% usecase and precompile the route definitions to function clause matches. For the other 5% cases, you can use custom plugs that are suited exactly for your needs. For example, you can do what you want with this:

defmodule MyApp.Router do

  scope "/", MyApp do

    get "/:id", SlugRouter, :show

    get "/:id", OtherController, :show

  end

end

defmodule MyApp.SlugRouter do

  import Plug.Conn

  def init(opts), do: opts

  def call(%Plug.Conn{params: %{"id" => id}} = conn, action) do

    cond do

      Regex.match?(~r/^\d{5}$/, id) ->

        SomeController.call(conn, SomeController.init(action))

      Regex.match?(~r/^A\d{4}$/, id) ->

        OtherController.call(conn, OtherController.init(action))

      true -> conn

    end

  end

end

Hope that helps

–Chris

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[Jamil Abreu]

Hi! In Phoenix 1.3 there seems to be an error related to the `true -> conn` part above. 

I'm getting `** (Plug.Conn.NotSentError) a response was neither set nor sent from the connection` on the route, and `unused import Plug.Conn` in the console.

It works when adding another direct call: `true -> SomeOtherController.call(conn, SomeOtherController.init(action))` but not with just `true -> conn`

Any ideas?

[Chris McCord]

You need to send a respond to the client one way or the other. If this plug is the last plug in your stack that may or may not send a response, you need to send a response from here. Perhaps your fall through case should either send a no content response or you should 404?

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/phoenix-talk/538e967c-7445-429a-8b53-66aadcb935bc%40googlegroups.com.

[Jamil Abreu]

My setup is similar to your example, where I expected `get "/:id", OtherController, :show` to catch any routes not handled by `get "/:id", SlugRouter, :show`.

Is a response still needed in this case? In my head I expected the conn to "continue on" down the list of routes to look for a match if not caught by SlugRouter. :thinking emoji: Appreciate this!!

  scope "/", MyApp do

    get "/:id", SlugRouter, :show

    get "/:id", OtherController, :show

  end

[Chris McCord]

Your plugs downstream of the router should still continue as normal, like you are guessing, but you need to make sure one of them sends a response, which looks like it’s not happening. So to be clear, it may be fine for your router to return the `conn` untouched, but in that case you need to ensure that some other plug/router downstream sends a response. Have you verified that?

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/phoenix-talk/788bbd88-e5ef-499d-bdaf-0c6ce5e69c19%40googlegroups.com.

[Jamil Abreu]

Gotcha! Yes, I verified that by removing my SlugRouter and confirming that OtherController picks up the route and sends a response as expected.

[Jamil Abreu]

Here's a repo where I recreate what I'm seeing: 

https://github.com/jamilabreu/regex_routing

On Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 12:11:03 PM UTC-5, Chris McCord wrote: