I never needed this but I have no opposition to include them. Could you provide a use case? What do other people think?
On Aug 21, 12:27 am, Kevin <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > this is a proposed patch to add global functions for accessing values > from (in particular) request.vars and friends (any dictionary-like > object will work) in a way that (safely) satisfies the assumption that > the input vars for a given key are either singletons or lists. > > The functions are rather simple: > > Given the request: /a/b/c?x=abc > getfirst(request.vars, 'x') -> 'abc' > getlast(request.vars, 'x') -> 'abc' > getall(request.vars, 'x') -> ['abc'] > > Given the request: /a/b/c?x=abc&x=def > getfirst(request.vars, 'x') -> 'abc' > getlast(request.vars, 'x') -> 'def' > getall(request.vars, 'x') -> ['abc', 'def'] > > getall(request.vars, 'y') -> None > getall(request.vars, 'y') or [] -> [] > > If there is anything like this already, I certainly will retract my > suggestion. The potentially controversial parts are that the > functions are defined in gluon.utils (I couldn't find a more logical > place to put them, and it makes no difference to me where they end > up), and they're loaded into the request environment, just like the > html helpers. > > Patch can be found at:http://pastebin.com/g6Vs9PrU > > Background/motivation: > > This function group is inspired by the behavior of <http:// > pythonpaste.org/webob/reference.html#query-post-variables> and similar > functionality that other frameworks provide, and would be particularly > useful in cases where the client-side code is not managed by something > like web2py's FORM interface -- as of version 1.83.2, web2py prepares > a Storage instance such that: > > /a/b/c?x=5 -> request.vars.x == '5' > /a/b/c?x=5&x=abc -> request.vars.x == ['5', 'abc'] > > This could lead to naive code like the following to fail with some > simple request fakery: > > if request.vars.search.upper().startswith('FUZZY'): pass # some real > code here > > It's possible that this kind of fakery could also lead to many of the > web2py validators failing in common cases (though I haven't looked > into that much). > > However, it is often allowable that the first (or last) value passed > is authoritative, leading to a more robust system.
