WebSharper Sitelets Cont’d: Developing a Blog Service

The previous article might have left you with an erroneous impression that WebSharper sitelets only support a static set of URLs. This is not the case. In fact, the user-defined Action type can be an arbitrary data structure that maps to a URL. This comes particularly handy when designing a blogging website, since the set of blogs and their URLs is not statically bounded. Something like this would do:

Now you would need to write a router, which is roughly a bijection between Action values and URLs. A boring way to do so might look like this:

Writing routers by hand you get full control – you can inspect an Http.Request value when routing, and generate any URL when linking. However writing the above code is not much fun. If you do not particularly care for the exact URLs, there is a much shorter way to get there:

The Infer function inspects the Action type by reflection to derive a router automatically. It is smart enough to handle records, unions, most scalar types, lists, and options. In our case it derives the following mapping:

A smart thing to do would be to alter it just a little bit, for example by making ShowRecentBlogs available at the root. This can be done by combining a simple table router with the inferred router:

This is much better: 80% of the benefit with 20% of the work.

Now that URL routing is out of the way, you can finally get down to the blog service itself. I present the most interesting thing first, the controller:

The controller simply handles actions (Action values) and returns responses (Content values), no surprises here. Together with a router, the controller forms a sitelet, a self-contained website ready to go by itself or be embedded in a bigger application:

For the model in this example, you can use the simplest thing that can possibly work in a development environment, namely a static mutable variable (see the listing at the end of the article). Now, views are quite straightforward as well. The only thing of interest is the use of WebSharper Formlets (client-side form combinators) to build the UI for editing and creating the blogs. I build a simple control that renders the form and talks to the model directly over RPC, redirecting to the homepage when done:

Time to try it out:

And here is the complete code listing: