Introducing Django Friendlyurls

Django Friendly URLs

Django Friendly URLs is a Django application allows you to create urls that directly return views. There is no 302 Redirect.

Why would you want such a thing?

The most common use case is that you have URLs which return user profiles such as http://www.example.com/user/1

Friendly URLs allow you to create a URL so that the user can also be accessed by going to:

http://www.example.com/jeff

The key is that the address bar in the browser does not change to http://www.example.com/user/1

The web server returns the same HTML document as http://www.example.com/user/1

Flow

The application looks up the string 'jeff' If it finds a friendly url match it will read out the absolute_path and attempt to resolve it by putting it through the URL resolver a 2nd time.

If it finds a resolution it will return that view.

Usage

Here is an example of how to implement friendly_urls for a user:

I put this in models.py:

from django.contrib.contenttypes import generic from friendlyurls import UrlMapping from django.contrib.auth.models import User

def get_absolute_url(self):

return u'/user/%s' % self.id

User.add_to_class('friendly_urls', generic.GenericRelation(UrlMapping)) User.get_absolute_url = get_absolute_url

This basically monkey patches the User model to add a field. You can then do

user = User.objects.get(pk=1) user.friendly_urls.all()

This will get a list of all the friendly urls.

You shouldn't have to monkey patch all the models.

Problems / Questions

Don't forget to run syncdb because friendlyurls creates a table to store the URL mappings.

Additional Settings

FRIENDLYURLS_IGNORE_CASE - Set this to True if you want to ignore the case when trying to find a path. Default: False

Todo Features

• Need to cache the results returned by a lookup for performance.

Probably do a from django.core.cache import cache

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/cache/?from=olddocs