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From: Gabriel Farrell <gsf747@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:18:33 -0400
Message-ID: <BANLkTinHWDK02nVCQQN4L1VcJa3+9BH77w@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: rewrite rules for alphabetic browse
To: user@couchdb.apache.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

I'm putting together a site where I have artists and works of art. I
would like to browse those artists and works alphabetically, with URLs
like http://example.com/artists/a and http://example.com/works/b. I
have a view called type_name:

  function(doc) {
    if (doc.type && doc.name) {
      emit([doc.type, doc.name]);
    }
  }

My "artists" list renders the results from that view in a template. I
can get the first page of artists with a rewrite like this:

  {
    "from": "artists/a",
    "to": "_list/artists/type_name",
    "query": {
      "startkey": ["artist", "a"],
      "endkey": ["artist", "aZZZZZ"]
    }
  },

How would I generalize this for all letters of the alphabet? I want to
do something like the following, but the last ":startkey" isn't
substituted:

  {
    "from": "artists/:startkey",
    "to": "_list/artists/type_name",
    "query": {
      "startkey": ["artist", ":startkey"],
      "endkey": ["artist", ":startkeyZZZZZ"]
    }
  },

I can achieve something close by extending the URL to
http://example.com/artists/a/aZZZZZ and using the following rewrite:

  {
    "from": "artists/:startkey/:endkey",
    "to": "_list/artists/type_name",
    "query": {
      "startkey": ["artist", ":startkey"],
      "endkey": ["artist", ":endkey"]
    }
  },

The URL is uglier but it works. Is there any way to make the shorter
URL work? Frankly, I think some of my trouble is that, coming from
other web frameworks, I'm not used to my URLs being constrained in
this way. I want to be able to grab the request path, munge it all
over with JavaScript, then send it on to my lists, shows, views, etc.