Pylons/Routes rewrite POST or GET to fancy URL

Question

The behavior I propose:

A user loads up my "search" page, www.site.com/search, types their query into a form, clicks submit, and then ends up at www.site.com/search/the+query instead of www.site.com/search?q=the+query. I've gone through a lot of the Pylons documentation already and just finished reading the Routes documentation and am wondering if this can/should happen at the Routes layer. I have already set up my application to perform a search when given www.site.com/search/the+query, but can not figure out how to send a form to this destination.

Or is this something that should happen inside a controller with a redirect_to()?

Or somewhere else?

Followup:

This is less an actual "set in stone" desire right now and more a curiosity for brainstorming future features. I'm designing an application which uses a Wikipedia dump and have observed that when a user performs a search on Wikipedia and the search isn't too ambiguous it redirects directly to an article link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple. It is actually performing an in-between HTTP 302 redirect step, and I am just curious if there's a more elegant/cute way of doing this in Pylons.

Answer 1

HTML forms are designed to go to a specific URL with a query string (?q=) or an equivalent body in a POST -- either you write clever and subtle Javascript to intercept the form submission and rewrite it in your preferred weird way, or use redirect_to (and the latter will take some doing).

But why do you need such weird behavior rather than just following the standard?! Please explain your use case in terms of application-level needs...!

Answer 2

You can send whatever content you want for any URL, but if you want a particular URL to appear in the browser's address bar, you have to use a redirect. This is independent of whether you use Pylons, Django or Rails on the server side.

In the handling for /search (whether POST or GET), one would normally run the query in the back end, and if there was only one search result (or one overwhelmingly relevant result) you would redirect to that result, otherwise to a page showing links to the top N results. That's just normal practice, AFAIK.