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+Comment Example
+===============
+
+.. contents::
+
+Introduction
+------------
+
+This is an example of how to write WSGI middleware with WebOb. The
+specific example adds a simple comment form to HTML web pages; any
+page served through the middleware that is HTML gets a comment form
+added to it, and shows any existing comments.
+
+Code
+----
+
+The finished code for this is available in
+`docs/comment-example-code/example.py
+<http://svn.pythonpaste.org/Paste/WebOb/trunk/docs/comment-example-code/example.py>`_
+-- you can run that file as a script to try it out.
+
+Instantiating Middleware
+------------------------
+
+Middleware of any complexity at all is usually best created as a
+class with its configuration as arguments to that class.
+
+Every middleware needs an application (``app``) that it wraps. This
+middleware also needs a location to store the comments; we'll put them
+all in a single directory.
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ import os
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+ def __init__(self, app, storage_dir):
+ self.app = app
+ self.storage_dir = storage_dir
+ if not os.path.exists(storage_dir):
+ os.makedirs(storage_dir)
+
+When you use this middleware, you'll use it like:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ app = ... make the application ...
+ app = Commenter(app, storage_dir='./comments')
+
+For our application we'll use a simple static file server that is
+included with `Paste <http://pythonpaste.org>`_ (use ``easy_install
+Paste`` to install this). The setup is all at the bottom of
+``example.py``, and looks like this:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ if __name__ == '__main__':
+ import optparse
+ parser = optparse.OptionParser(
+ usage='%prog --port=PORT BASE_DIRECTORY'
+ )
+ parser.add_option(
+ '-p', '--port',
+ default='8080',
+ dest='port',
+ type='int',
+ help='Port to serve on (default 8080)')
+ parser.add_option(
+ '--comment-data',
+ default='./comments',
+ dest='comment_data',
+ help='Place to put comment data into (default ./comments/)')
+ options, args = parser.parse_args()
+ if not args:
+ parser.error('You must give a BASE_DIRECTORY')
+ base_dir = args[0]
+ from paste.urlparser import StaticURLParser
+ app = StaticURLParser(base_dir)
+ app = Commenter(app, options.comment_data)
+ from wsgiref.simple_server import make_server
+ httpd = make_server('localhost', options.port, app)
+ print 'Serving on http://localhost:%s' % options.port
+ try:
+ httpd.serve_forever()
+ except KeyboardInterrupt:
+ print '^C'
+
+I won't explain it here, but basically it takes some options, creates
+an application that serves static files
+(``StaticURLParser(base_dir)``), wraps it with ``Commenter(app,
+options.comment_data)`` then serves that.
+
+The Middleware
+--------------
+
+While we've created the class structure for the middleware, it doesn't
+actually do anything. Here's a kind of minimal version of the
+middleware (using WebOb):
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ from webob import Request
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+
+ def __init__(self, app, storage_dir):
+ self.app = app
+ self.storage_dir = storage_dir
+ if not os.path.exists(storage_dir):
+ os.makedirs(storage_dir)
+
+ def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
+ req = Request(environ)
+ resp = req.get_response(self.app)
+ return resp(environ, start_response)
+
+This doesn't modify the response it any way. You could write it like
+this without WebOb:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+ ...
+ def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
+ return self.app(environ, start_response)
+
+But it won't be as convenient later. First, lets create a little bit
+of infrastructure for our middleware. We need to save and load
+per-url data (the comments themselves). We'll keep them in pickles,
+where each url has a pickle named after the url (but double-quoted, so
+``http://localhost:8080/index.html`` becomes
+``http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A8080%2Findex.html``).
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ from cPickle import load, dump
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+ ...
+
+ def get_data(self, url):
+ filename = self.url_filename(url)
+ if not os.path.exists(filename):
+ return []
+ else:
+ f = open(filename, 'rb')
+ data = load(f)
+ f.close()
+ return data
+
+ def save_data(self, url, data):
+ filename = self.url_filename(url)
+ f = open(filename, 'wb')
+ dump(data, f)
+ f.close()
+
+ def url_filename(self, url):
+ # Double-quoting makes the filename safe
+ return os.path.join(self.storage_dir, urllib.quote(url, ''))
+
+You can get the full request URL with ``req.url``, so to get the
+comment data with these methods you do ``data =
+self.get_data(req.url)``.
+
+Now we'll update the ``__call__`` method to filter *some* responses,
+and get the comment data for those. We don't want to change responses
+that were error responses (anything but ``200``), nor do we want to
+filter responses that aren't HTML. So we get:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+ ...
+
+ def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
+ req = Request(environ)
+ resp = req.get_response(self.app)
+ if resp.content_type != 'text/html' or resp.status_int != 200:
+ return resp(environ, start_response)
+ data = self.get_data(req.url)
+ ... do stuff with data, update resp ...
+ return resp(environ, start_response)
+
+So far we're punting on actually adding the comments to the page. We
+also haven't defined what ``data`` will hold. Let's say it's a list
+of dictionaries, where each dictionary looks like ``{'name': 'John
+Doe', 'homepage': 'http://blog.johndoe.com', 'comments': 'Great
+site!'}``.
+
+We'll also need a simple method to add stuff to the page. We'll use a
+regular expression to find the end of the page and put text in:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ import re
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+ ...
+
+ _end_body_re = re.compile(r'</body.*?>', re.I|re.S)
+
+ def add_to_end(self, html, extra_html):
+ """
+ Adds extra_html to the end of the html page (before </body>)
+ """
+ match = self._end_body_re.search(html)
+ if not match:
+ return html + extra_html
+ else:
+ return html[:match.start()] + extra_html + html[match.start():]
+
+And then we'll use it like:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ data = self.get_data(req.url)
+ body = resp.body
+ body = self.add_to_end(body, self.format_comments(data))
+ resp.body = body
+ return resp(environ, start_response)
+
+We get the body, update it, and put it back in the response. This
+also updates ``Content-Length``. Then we define:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ from webob import html_escape
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+ ...
+
+ def format_comments(self, comments):
+ if not comments:
+ return ''
+ text = []
+ text.append('<hr>')
+ text.append('<h2><a name="comment-area"></a>Comments (%s):</h2>' % len(comments))
+ for comment in comments:
+ text.append('<h3><a href="%s">%s</a> at %s:</h3>' % (
+ html_escape(comment['homepage']), html_escape(comment['name']),
+ time.strftime('%c', comment['time'])))
+ # Susceptible to XSS attacks!:
+ text.append(comment['comments'])
+ return ''.join(text)
+
+We put in a header (with an anchor we'll use later), and a section for
+each comment. Note that ``html_escape`` is the same as ``cgi.escape``
+and just turns ``&`` into ``&amp;``, etc.
+
+Because we put in some text without quoting it is susceptible to a
+`Cross-Site Scripting
+<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting>`_ attack. Fixing
+that is beyond the scope of this tutorial; you could quote it or clean
+it with something like `lxml.html.clean
+<http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxmlhtml.html#cleaning-up-html>`_.
+
+Accepting Comments
+------------------
+
+All of those pieces *display* comments, but still no one can actually
+make comments. To handle this we'll take a little piece of the URL
+space for our own, everything under ``/.comments``, so when someone
+POSTs there it will add a comment.
+
+When the request comes in there are two parts to the path:
+``SCRIPT_NAME`` and ``PATH_INFO``. Everything in ``SCRIPT_NAME`` has
+already been parsed, and everything in ``PATH_INFO`` has yet to be
+parsed. That means that the URL *without* ``PATH_INFO`` is the path
+to the middleware; we can intercept anything else below
+``SCRIPT_NAME`` but nothing above it. The name for the URL without
+``PATH_INFO`` is ``req.application_url``. We have to capture it early
+to make sure it doesn't change (since the WSGI application we are
+wrapping may update ``SCRIPT_NAME`` and ``PATH_INFO``).
+
+So here's what this all looks like:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+ ...
+
+ def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
+ req = Request(environ)
+ if req.path_info_peek() == '.comments':
+ return self.process_comment(req)(environ, start_response)
+ # This is the base path of *this* middleware:
+ base_url = req.application_url
+ resp = req.get_response(self.app)
+ if resp.content_type != 'text/html' or resp.status_int != 200:
+ # Not an HTML response, we don't want to
+ # do anything to it
+ return resp(environ, start_response)
+ # Make sure the content isn't gzipped:
+ resp.decode_content()
+ comments = self.get_data(req.url)
+ body = resp.body
+ body = self.add_to_end(body, self.format_comments(comments))
+ body = self.add_to_end(body, self.submit_form(base_url, req))
+ resp.body = body
+ return resp(environ, start_response)
+
+``base_url`` is the path where the middleware is located (if you run
+the example server, it will be ``http://localhost:PORT/``). We use
+``req.path_info_peek()`` to look at the next segment of the URL --
+what comes after base_url. If it is ``.comments`` then we handle it
+internally and don't pass the request on.
+
+We also put in a little guard, ``resp.decode_content()`` in case the
+application returns a gzipped response.
+
+Then we get the data, add the comments, add the *form* to make new
+comments, and return the result.
+
+submit_form
+~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+Here's what the form looks like:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+ ...
+
+ def submit_form(self, base_path, req):
+ return '''<h2>Leave a comment:</h2>
+ <form action="%s/.comments" method="POST">
+ <input type="hidden" name="url" value="%s">
+ <table width="100%%">
+ <tr><td>Name:</td>
+ <td><input type="text" name="name" style="width: 100%%"></td></tr>
+ <tr><td>URL:</td>
+ <td><input type="text" name="homepage" style="width: 100%%"></td></tr>
+ </table>
+ Comments:<br>
+ <textarea name="comments" rows=10 style="width: 100%%"></textarea><br>
+ <input type="submit" value="Submit comment">
+ </form>
+ ''' % (base_path, html_escape(req.url))
+
+Nothing too exciting. It submits a form with the keys ``url`` (the
+URL being commented on), ``name``, ``homepage``, and ``comments``.
+
+process_comment
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+If you look at the method call, what we do is call the method then
+treat the result as a WSGI application:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ return self.process_comment(req)(environ, start_response)
+
+You could write this as:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ response = self.process_comment(req)
+ return response(environ, start_response)
+
+A common pattern in WSGI middleware that *doesn't* use WebOb is to
+just do:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ return self.process_comment(environ, start_response)
+
+But the WebOb style makes it easier to modify the response if you want
+to; modifying a traditional WSGI response/application output requires
+changing your logic flow considerably.
+
+Here's the actual processing code:
+
+.. code-block::
+
+ from webob import exc
+ from webob import Response
+
+ class Commenter(object):
+ ...
+
+ def process_comment(self, req):
+ try:
+ url = req.params['url']
+ name = req.params['name']
+ homepage = req.params['homepage']
+ comments = req.params['comments']
+ except KeyError, e:
+ resp = exc.HTTPBadRequest('Missing parameter: %s' % e)
+ return resp
+ data = self.get_data(url)
+ data.append(dict(
+ name=name,
+ homepage=homepage,
+ comments=comments,
+ time=time.gmtime()))
+ self.save_data(url, data)
+ resp = exc.HTTPSeeOther(location=url+'#comment-area')
+ return resp
+
+We either give a Bad Request response (if the form submission is
+somehow malformed), or a redirect back to the original page.
+
+The classes in ``webob.exc`` (like ``HTTPBadRequest`` and
+``HTTPSeeOther``) are Response subclasses that can be used to quickly
+create responses for these non-200 cases where the response body
+usually doesn't matter much.
+
+Conclusion
+----------
+
+This shows how to make response modifying middleware, which is
+probably the most difficult kind of middleware to write with WSGI --
+modifying the request is quite simple in comparison, as you simply
+update ``environ``.