Play Framework - Variables in URL instead of as ? parameters - url

Question

I'm a just starting to learn Play, so this is a basic question, but I've searched every term I can think of and can't find the answer.
All I want to do is have a page that on submit takes an ID from a text field and puts it in the URL directly (e.g. /myservice/person/123). Instead, the URL being generated contains the ID as a parameter (e.g. /myservice/person?id=123).
I know my controller is being invoked correctly if I type the URL in by hand, so I'm inclined to think my routes file is correct. This is what my entry looks like:
GET /person/:id controllers.PersonActions.getPerson(id: String)
So I'm assuming something is going wrong in my template, which looks like this:
#form(routes.PersonActions.getPerson(personID)) {
#* #inputText(personForm("id")) *#
<input type="text" name="id" value="#personID">
<input type="submit" value="Get">
}
You can see that I've commented out another way using #inputText also, but it behaves identically for me. I'm not tied to either method.
I've also tried this using POST, which removes the ID from the URL entirely, which I don't understand either, but since I'm just doing a simple query, I'd rather use GET.
Can anyone help me understand what's going on here? I feel like there's something fundamental about how routing/URLgeneration works that I'm not understanding, but I've gone through the tutorial and the docs so many times today I'm at a loss.
Thanks in advance.
Oh, and I'm using Java 7, Play 2.1, and Eclipse Kepler

Answer 1

I think you are trying to skip a step and map form request data from a view directly to a controller method. You will need to submit the form, have a controller parse the data and then render the next appropriate view based on the data you parsed from the form.
Remember that the personId in your view is a parameter that is bound server-side when the view is rendered. In this case, the submit url of the form is hard coded to whatever personId is passed in to the view at render time -- it doesn't change dynamically when the input box changes.
To fix, add a controller method to accept requests from /person (I'm guessing this based on the part in your question that says the form is being submitted to /person?id=123, in any case it should be the URL of the form you've shown above)
e.g. if you want to use a GET method for the form add:
GET /person controllers.PersonActions.findPerson(id: String)
and in your PersonActions controller (I'm assuming you're using Java, if scala I'm sure you can adapt it from the docs)
public static Result findPerson(String id){
/*
* I'm assuming this method exists and works because you say
* when you type in /person/123 manually the routing works
* and your router says getPerson is the method name for that URL.
*/
return getPerson(id);
}