Pretty URLs

The Mentawai controller supports search-friendly URLs out of the box. So instead of:

http://www.mysite.com/Topic.show.mtw?id=123

You can have:

http://www.mysite.com/mtw/Topic-show/123/how-to-make-search-friendly-urls-with-mentawai

Map the URLs inside the web.xml:

	<!-- You must map all URLs starting with /mtw to the Mentawai  controller -->
	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>Controller</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>*.mtw</url-pattern>
		<url-pattern>/mtw/*</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>

Give names to the parameters:

A pretty URL does not contain parameter names. The Mentawai controller takes them in order and place them in the action input with indexes starting at one. So for the URL:

http://www.mysite.com/mtw/Topic-show/123/how-to-make-search-friendly-urls-with-mentawai

The action input would have two vaules:

String id = input.getString("1"); // ===> "123"

String title = input.getString("2"); // ===> "how-to-make-search-friendly-urls-with-mentawai"

You can work with the indexes but it is not very convenient. Therefore Mentawai allows you to assign names to the parameters in the application manager:

        ActionConfig mainAction = action("/Page", PageAction.class)
        	.prettyURLParams("id", "title")
        	.on(SHOW, redir()) // for the pretty url
            .on(SUCCESS, fwd("/show_page.jsp"));

So now you can do:

String id = input.getString("id"); // ===> "123"

String title = input.getString("title"); // ===> "how-to-make-search-friendly-urls-with-mentawai"

Redirecting to the pretty URL:

In you action, you want to enforce the correct URL with the correct id and title, so if the user types:

http://www.mysite.com/mtw/Topic-show/123/are-you-crazy

the action will automatically redirect to the correct URL. You can do that with the following piece of code inside your action:

        if (isPrettyURL()) { // is the URL a pretty URL or a regular one?
        	// check if URL is complete with the correct title...
        	String correctTitle = topic.getPrettyURLFormattedTitle();
        	String inputTitle = input.getString("title");
        	if (inputTitle == null || !inputTitle.equals(correctTitle)) {
        		String prettyURL = getPrettyURL("Topic", "show", id, correctTitle); // => /mtw/Topic-show/id/correctTitle
        		redir(prettyURL); // <=== dynamic redirect (SHOW goes to redir() in the app manager)
        		return SHOW;
        	}
        }

NOTE: The method getPrettyURL belongs to BaseAction, so it is given to you. Same thing for the isPrettyURL method.

Formatting text to be displayed in the prettty URL:

The method topic.getPrettyURLFormattedTitle() above returns the title of your topic formatted to be show in the pretty URL. To format any string so it can be correctly shown in a pretty URL, you can use the following utility method:

public void setTitle(String title) {
    this.title = title;
    this.prettyTitle = HttpUtils.getPrettyText(title);
}

public String getPrettyURLFormattedTitle() {
    return prettyTitle;
}