routes with case insensitivity

[tanin47]

Today we told user to type in the URL directly, and, to our surprise, the user capitalised the first letter of the path, and that led to 404.

I wonder if Play supports case insensitivity on conf/routes. In general, I don't care whether it's lower or upper case, though I do care that :variable is case sensitive.

I was looking around and couldn't find a way to do this where it wouldn't impact :variable. I wonder if this would be a good feature add. In general, it is a bit unreasonable to have /path and /Path pointing to a different place anyway. So, maybe this might apply to many people who use Play.

Thank you!

[ihostage]

Hi, @tanin47! 👋
So, in general URL is case-sensitive (https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/htmlweb.html) and we can't change a current behaviour of Play.

URLs in general are case-sensitive (with the exception of machine names). There may be URLs, or parts of URLs, where case doesn't matter, but identifying these may not be easy. Users should always consider that URLs are case-sensitive.

Moreover, I think a reverse proxy (like Nginx) can do this work and rewrite (make lowercase) URL for request before proxy them to Play server.

But I agree, that case-[in]sensitive can be a configurable feature in Play in future if someone implement it.

[tanin47]

+1 on making it configurable.

One complication is that: if I have a route looking like: /project/:projectId, I'd want only the /project/ part to be case-insensitive. The :projectId should stay case sensitive. We can't simply lowercase everything. This blocked me from implementing a regular filter to solve this in a robust way.

I wonder if you can give me some pointers. How would you go about and implement it? I might take a stab at it.