I'm willing to change the docs, but I'd like to try to explain it in an email to make sure the explanation is okay.
The key sentence of the documentation is: "start is loaded as a servlet and responds to requests that match servlet-regexp." The default for servlet-regexp is such that the ONLY path that the servlet responds to is "/servlets/standalone.rkt" and ALL other paths are handled by the static file handlers. It is common to change the servlet-regexp to something like #rx"", which causes ALL requests to be handled by the servlet. When you do this, the documentation is still correct, but you may not realize the consequence of what you've done. Throughout the Web server infrastructure, and serve/servlet does not change this, if you call (next-dispatcher) then the current responder FAILS and the next responder gets a chance. In the context of serve/servlet, if you call (next-dispatcher) after using #rx"" to take over all requests, then for that particular request where (next-dispatcher) was dynamically called, the static handlers take over. It so happens that the default "else" clause in web-server/dispatch is to call (next-dispatcher). From the documentation: "If else-fun is left out, one is provided that calls (next-dispatcher) to signal to the Web Server that this dispatcher does not apply." Thus, if you use the #rx"" regexp AND dispatch-rules, then it is likely that the "right" thing will happen without you trying because you won't write an else and then if your servlet doesn't handle the request, the static handler will be in control. Overall, I don't know what the documentation should be changed to say. All this is in the documentation right now: you just might not realize you are telling the servlet to handle everything, but once you realize that you just need to know how to turn that off, and that isn't specific in any way to serve/servlet, so I don't feel like it is appropriate to put it there. (Alternatively, you should just be more specific in your servlet-regexp, by using something like (re-complement #rx"/static/.+"), and that's reasonable to expect a user to realize, IMHO.) Jay On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 10:55 PM, John Clements <[email protected]> wrote: > The serve/servlet function has several flags that allude to the ability to > serve static files (#:extra-files-paths, etc.). However, nowhere in that > documentation does it say under what circumstances the web-server serves > content from that pool of files. After much struggling and cursing, I > finally found a post by Matt Jadud. Even then, it took me quite a while to > realize that the 'dispatch-rules' function was the key to actually allowing > some requests to reach the static content. Perhaps the serve/servlet > documentation should explicitly specify when content is served from static > files, or at least provide a pointer to the dispatch-rules documentation. > > Thoughts? > > John > > > ____________________ > Racket Users list: > http://lists.racket-lang.org/users -- Jay McCarthy <[email protected]> Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay "The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93 ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
