django-multiurl

Have you ever wanted multiple views to match to the same URL? Now you can.

You may once have tried something like this:

urlpatterns = [
    url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.people),
    url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.place),
]

However, if you try this, /app/san-francisco/ will only map to app.views.people. Raising an Http404 from app.views.people doesn't help: you only get a 404 in the browser because Django stops resolving URLs at the first match.

Well, django-multiurl solves this problem. Just pip install django-multiurl, then do this:

from multiurl import multiurl

urlpatterns = [
    multiurl(
        url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.people),
        url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.place),
    )
]

Now in your views, raise multiurl.ContinueResolving anywhere you'd like to break out of the view and keep resolving. For example, here's what app.views.people might look like:

from multiurl import ContinueResolving

def people(request, name):
    try:
        person = Person.objects.get(name=name)
    except Person.DoesNotExist:
        raise ContinueResolving
    return render(...)

That's it! ContinueResolving will cause multiurl to continue onto the next view (app.views.place, in this example).

A few notes to round things out:

• If you don't want to use ContinueResolving -- perhaps you'd rather continue using get_object_or_404, or you're using third-party views that you can't modify to raise ContinueResolving, you can pass a catch argument into multiurl to control which exceptions are considered "continue" statements. For example, to allow Http404 exceptions to continue resolving, do this:

  urlpatterns = [
      multiurl(
          url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.people),
          url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.place),
          catch = (Http404, ContinueResolving)
      )
  ]
  

  As you can see, catch should be a tuple of exceptions. It's probably a good idea to always include ContinueResolving in the tuple.

• If the last view in a multiurl raises ContinueResolving (or another "continuing" exception), a 404 will be raised instead. That is, if resolving "falls off the end" of some multi-urls, you'll get the 404 you expect.

• Reverse URL resolution just works as expected. Name your sub-URLs and then reverse your heart out.

Contributing

Development takes place on GitHub; pull requests are welcome. Run tests with tox.