Hi all,
Revisiting the issue that was discussed in this thread:
http://old.nabble.com/the-servlet-mapping-problem-td26830074.html
To recap the major hole that was brought up by David in that having conflicting mappings would be in the end a bad idea. But keeping on this track I came up with a way to avoid having to do the wild card mapping such as /*/wfs in order to support the desired url for virtual workspaces:
/geoserver/<workspace>/<service>
The idea was to extend the SimpleUrlHandlerMapping that is used to map partial paths to a spring controller endpoint such as the ows dispatcher. The subclass would use the regular mappings:
/wfs
/wfs/*
But in the case of not a direct match check the workspace prefixing / virtual service case. The upshot is that we end up with an implicit set of discrete mappings:
/topp/wfs
/nurc/wfs
...
Without having to use the wild card.
However there is still the possibility of overlap. For instance if one created a workspace named "rest" there would be a conflict with the rest mappings.
Thoughts? To recap the upsides:
1) single mapping in web.xml
2) the desired aesthetic url structure of /geoserver/<workspace>/<service>
The downside:
1) Potential conflicts.
We could address the downside with some workspace name validation. Since we are basically agreeing that any spring dispatch mapping will need to start with a non wild card we could validate a workspace name against the first component of each mapping. It could be done dynamically by looking up all the UrlHandlerMappings in the application context.
Thoughts?
--
Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.