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§HTTP routing

§The built-in HTTP router

The router is the component that translates each incoming HTTP request to an action call (a public method in a controller class).

An HTTP request is seen as an event by the MVC framework. This event contains two major pieces of information:

the request path (such as /clients/1542, /photos/list), including the query string.
the HTTP method (GET, POST, …).

Routes are defined in the conf/routes file, which is compiled. This means that you’ll see route errors directly in your browser:

§Dependency Injection

Play’s default routes generator creates a router class that accepts controller instances in an @Inject-annotated constructor. That means the class is suitable for use with dependency injection and can also be instantiated manually using the constructor.

Before Play 2.7.0, Play supported a static routes generator that supported defining actions as static methods. That is no longer supported, as Play no longer relies on static state. If you wish to use your own static state you can still do so in a controller using instance methods.

§The routes file syntax

conf/routes is the configuration file used by the router. This file lists all of the routes needed by the application. Each route consists of an HTTP method and URI pattern associated with a call to an action method.

Let’s see what a route definition looks like:

GET   /clients/:id          controllers.Clients.show(id: Long)

Note: in the action call, the parameter type comes after the parameter name, like in Scala.

Each route starts with the HTTP method, followed by the URI pattern. The last element of a route is the call definition.

You can also add comments to the route file, with the # character:

# Display a client.
GET   /clients/:id          controllers.Clients.show(id: Long)

§The HTTP method

The HTTP method can be any of the valid methods supported by HTTP (GET, PATCH, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS).

§The URI pattern

The URI pattern defines the route’s request path. Some parts of the request path can be dynamic.

§Static path

For example, to exactly match GET /clients/all incoming requests, you can define this route:

GET   /clients/all          controllers.Clients.list()

§Dynamic parts

If you want to define a route that, say, retrieves a client by id, you need to add a dynamic part:

GET   /clients/:id          controllers.Clients.show(id: Long)

Note: A URI pattern may have more than one dynamic part.

The default matching strategy for a dynamic part is defined by the regular expression [^/]+, meaning that any dynamic part defined as :id will match exactly one URI path segment. Unlike other pattern types, path segments are automatically URI-decoded in the route, before being passed to your controller, and encoded in the reverse route.

§Dynamic parts spanning several /

If you want a dynamic part to capture more than one URI path segment, separated by forward slashes, you can define a dynamic part using the *id syntax, also known as a wildcard pattern, which uses the .* regular expression:

GET   /files/*name          controllers.Application.download(name)

Here, for a request like GET /files/images/logo.png, the name dynamic part will capture the images/logo.png value.

Note that dynamic parts spanning several / are not decoded by the router or encoded by the reverse router. It is your responsibility to validate the raw URI segment as you would for any user input. The reverse router simply does a string concatenation, so you will need to make sure the resulting path is valid, and does not, for example, contain multiple leading slashes or non-ASCII characters.

§Dynamic parts with custom regular expressions

You can also define your own regular expression for a dynamic part, using the $id<regex> syntax:

GET   /items/$id<[0-9]+>    controllers.Items.show(id: Long)

Just like with wildcard routes, the parameter is not decoded by the router or encoded by the reverse router. You’re responsible for validating the input to make sure it makes sense in that context.

It is also possible to apply modifiers by preceding the route with a line starting with a +. This can change the behavior of certain Play components. One such modifier is the “nocsrf” modifier to bypass the CSRF filter:

+ nocsrf
POST  /api/new              controllers.Api.newThing()

§Call to action generator method

The last part of a route definition is the call. This part must define a valid call to an action method.

If the method does not define any parameters, just give the fully-qualified method name:

GET   /                     controllers.Application.homePage()

If the action method defines parameters, the corresponding parameter values will be searched for in the request URI, either extracted from the URI path itself, or from the query string.

# Extract the page parameter from the path.
# i.e. http://myserver.com/index
GET   /:page                controllers.Application.show(page)

Or:

# Extract the page parameter from the query string.
# i.e. http://myserver.com/?page=index
GET   /                     controllers.Application.show(page)

Here is the corresponding show method definition in the controllers.Application controller:

public Result show(String page) {
  String content = Page.getContentOf(page);
  return ok(content).as("text/html");
}

§Parameter types

For parameters of type String, the parameter type is optional. If you want Play to transform the incoming parameter into a specific Scala type, you can add an explicit type:

GET   /clients/:id          controllers.Clients.show(id: Long)

Then use the same type for the corresponding action method parameter in the controller:

public Result show(Long id) {
  Client client = clientService.findById(id);
  return ok(views.html.Client.show(client));
}

Note: The parameter types are specified using a suffix syntax. Also, the generic types are specified using the [] symbols instead of <>, as in Java. For example, List[String] is the same type as the Java List<String>.

§Parameters with fixed values

Sometimes you’ll want to use a fixed value for a parameter:

# Extract the page parameter from the path, or fix the value for /
GET   /                     controllers.Application.show(page = "home")
GET   /:page                controllers.Application.show(page)

§Parameters with default values

You can also provide a default value that will be used if no value is found in the incoming request:

# Pagination links, like /clients?page=3
GET   /clients              controllers.Clients.list(page: Int ?= 1)

§Optional parameters

You can also specify an optional parameter that does not need to be present in all requests:

# The version parameter is optional. E.g. /api/list-all?version=3.0
GET   /api/list-all         controllers.Api.list(version ?= null)
# or
GET   /api/list-all         controllers.Api.listOpt(version: java.util.Optional[String])

§Passing the current request to an action method

You can also pass on the current request to an action method. Just add it as a parameter:

GET   /                     controllers.Application.dashboard(request: Request)

And the corresponding action method:

public Result dashboard(Http.Request request) {
  return ok("Hello, your request path " + request.path());
}

Play will automatically detect a route param of type Request (which is an import for play.mvc.Http.Request) and will pass the actual request into the corresponding action method’s param. You can, of course, mix a Request param with other params and it doesn’t matter at which position the Request param is.

§Routing priority

Many routes can match the same request. If there is a conflict, the first route (in declaration order) is used.

§Reverse routing

The router can be used to generate a URL from within a Java call. This makes it possible to centralize all your URI patterns in a single configuration file, so you can be more confident when refactoring your application.

For each controller used in the routes file, the router will generate a ‘reverse controller’ in the routes package, having the same action methods, with the same signature, but returning a play.mvc.Call instead of a play.mvc.Result.

The play.mvc.Call defines an HTTP call, and provides both the HTTP method and the URI.

For example, if you create a controller like:

package controllers;

import play.*;
import play.mvc.*;

public class Application extends Controller {

  public Result hello(String name) {
    return ok("Hello " + name + "!");
  }
}

And if you map it in the conf/routes file:

# Hello action
GET   /hello/:name          controllers.Application.hello(name)

You can then reverse the URL to the hello action method, by using the controllers.routes.Application reverse controller:

// Redirect to /hello/Bob
public Result index() {
  return redirect(controllers.routes.Application.hello("Bob"));
}

Note: There is a routes subpackage for each controller package. So the action controllers.Application.hello can be reversed via controllers.routes.Application.hello (as long as there is no other route before it in the routes file that happens to match the generated path).

The reverse action method works quite simply: it takes your parameters and substitutes them back into the route pattern. In the case of path segments (:foo), the value is encoded before the substitution is done. For regex and wildcard patterns the string is substituted in raw form, since the value may span multiple segments. Make sure you escape those components as desired when passing them to the reverse route, and avoid passing unvalidated user input.

§Relative routes

There are instances where returning a relative route instead of an absolute may be useful. The routes returned by play.mvc.Call are always absolute (they lead with a /), which can lead to problems when requests to your web application are rewritten by HTTP proxies, load balancers, and API gateways. Some examples where using a relative route would be useful include:

Hosting an app behind a web gateway that prefixes all routes with something other than what is configured in your conf/routes file, and roots your application at a route it’s not expecting.
When dynamically rendering stylesheets, you need asset links to be relative because they may end up getting served from different URLs by a CDN.

To be able to generate a relative route you need to know what to make the target route relative to (the start route). The start route can be retrieved from the current RequestHeader. Therefore, to generate a relative route it’s required that you pass in your current RequestHeader or the start route as a String parameter.

For example, given controller endpoints like:

package controllers;

import play.*;
import play.mvc.*;

public class Relative extends Controller {

  public Result helloview(Http.Request request) {
        ok(views.html.hello.render("Bob", request));
  }

  public Result hello(String name) {
    return ok("Hello " + name + "!");
  }
}

And if you map it in the conf/routes file:

GET     /foo/bar/hello              controllers.Relative.helloview(request: Request)
GET     /hello/:name                controllers.Relative.hello(name)

You can then define relative routes using the reverse router as before and include an additional call to relativeTo(play.mvc.RequestHeader requestHeader):

@(name: String, request: Http.RequestHeader)

<h1>Hello @name</h1>

<a href="@routes.Relative.hello(name)">Absolute Link</a>
<a href="@routes.Relative.hello(name).relativeTo(request)">Relative Link</a>

Note: The Http.Request passed from the controller is cast to a Http.RequestHeader in the view parameters.

When requesting /foo/bar/hello the generated HTML will look like so:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <title>Bob</title>
    </head>
    <body>
      <a href="/hello/Bob">Absolute Link</a>
      <a href="../../hello/Bob">Relative Link</a>
    </body>
</html>

§The Default Controller

Play includes a Default controller which provides a handful of useful actions. These can be invoked directly from the routes file:

# Redirects to https://www.playframework.com/ with 303 See Other
GET   /about      controllers.Default.redirect(to = "https://www.playframework.com/")

# Responds with 404 Not Found
GET   /orders     controllers.Default.notFound

# Responds with 500 Internal Server Error
GET   /clients    controllers.Default.error

# Responds with 501 Not Implemented
GET   /posts      controllers.Default.todo

In this example, GET / redirects to an external website, but it’s also possible to redirect to another action (such as /posts in the above example).

§Advanced Routing

See Routing DSL.

Next: Manipulating the HTTP response

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