WebResource

A WebResource is a virtual file accessible via the HTTP server. Each resource object has a path, which can be given as a simple string that must be matched exactly, or as a RexPattern object with a regular expression to be matched. Each object also has a "processRequest" method, which the server invokes to answer the request when the path is matched.

class WebResource : object

The group this resource is part of. This is the object that "contains" the resource, via its 'contents' property; any object will work here, since it's just a place to put the contents list for the resource group.

By default, we put all resources into the mainWebGroup object.

The point of the group is to allow different servers to use different sets of resources, or to allow one server to use different resource sets under different circumstances. When a server processes a request, it does so by looking through the 'contents' list for a group of its choice.

The priority of this resource. If the path is given as a regular expression, a given request might match more than one resource. In such cases, the matching resource with the highest priority is the one that's actually used to process the request.

The virtual path to the resource. This is the apparent URL path to this resource, as seen by the client.

URL paths follow the Unix file system conventions in terms of format, but don't confuse the virtual path with an actual file system path. The vpath doesn't have anything to do with the disk file system on the server machine or anywhere else. That's why we call it "virtual" - it's merely the apparent location, from the client's perspective.

When the server receives a request from the client, it looks at the URL sent by the client to determine which WebResource object should handle the request. The server does this by matching the resource path portion of the URL to the virtual path of each WebResource, until it finds a WebResource that matches. The resource path in the URL is the part of the URL following the domain, and continuing up to but not including any "?" query parameters. The resource path always starts with a slash "/". For example, for the URL "http://192.168.1.15/test/path?param=1", the resource path would be "/test/path".

The virtual path can be given as a string or as a RexPattern. If it's a string, a URL resource path must match the virtual path exactly, including upper/lower case. If the virtual path is given as a RexPattern, the URL resource path will be matched to the pattern with the usual regular expression rules.

Determine if this resource matches the given request. 'query' is the parsed query from the request, as returned by req.parseQuery(). 'req' is the HTTPRequest object representing the request; you can use this to extract more information from the request, such as cookies or the client's network address.

This method returns true if the request matches this resource, nil if not.

You can override this to specify more complex matching rules than you could achieve just by specifying the path string or RexPattern. For example, you could make the request conditional on the time of day, past request history, cookies in the request, parameters, etc.

Process the request. This is invoked when we determine that this is the highest priority resource object matching the request. 'req' is the HTTPRequest object; 'query' is the parsed query data as returned by req.parseQuery(). The query information is provided for convenience, in case the result depends on the query parameters.