discussion: resolving requests to "/home" parents route should work if i give it a handler

[merveillevaneck]

hi there. love the library, great work!

I just set up a small reitit router to test out a few things and noticed something about the behavior. I don't know if this is intentional, so opening a discussion point seemed to be a better idea than to just assume its a bug, since I was struggling to find anything in the documentation regarding this.

here is a screenshot of the example (note, in the example, the parent route is /home which is weird but bare with me, its just an example)

as you can see, I am making a ring router and handler that uses /home as a parent in the path, with potential subroutes. nothing special just standard http. but then i expected the result to be as the expected-result def in the comment block below the router. (apply-generic here is just a set of standard default from ring defaults).

my question is: should i expect the above router to "just work" and resolve my request to "/home" simply by adding a handler using {:get {:handler home}}? ergo, should I expect a valid response from this router when requesting /home instead of nil?

the actual response is nil.

my 2 cents is I should expect it to work. as this is normal behavior in many http applications. though i have not built a router myself, so maybe there is some best practice im unaware of suggesting otherwise?

any explanation welcome?

P.S. if I explicitly define child paths as "" and "/" then it does work, but this is slightly annoying as I then have to define 2 paths for the parent instead of just one declared handler that catches both paths.

[Outrovurt]

I've been using Reitit for years, but this very thing caught me when I first started using it.

I completely agree, it isn't intuitive at all having to place "" or "/" as children for "/home", especially as you only have to do it when "/home" has one or more other children (in this case "/user"). Otherwise there is no need for explicitly add adding "" or "/", it will just default to the handler you set for "/home". That said, I've just gotten used to adding "" and "/" where required. It's a small pain, but it does get it to work. I'm sure there's a reason behind it but I don't know what it is.