Change Grails REST format /controller/<id>/<action> - grails

Question

I messed around with this a bit yesterday and failed miserably. I want to convert:
"/$controller/$action?/$id?"
To
#in psudo
"/$controller/$id?/$action?"
#ideal regex
"\/(\w+)(\/\d+)?(\/\w+)?"
The most obvious way failed "/$controller/$action?/$id?"
I can write the regex's to do it, but I am having trouble finding a way to using true regexs (I found RegexUrlMapping but could not find out how to use it), and also can't find documentation on how to assign a group to a variable.
My question is 2 parts:
How to I define a URL Resource with a true regex.
How to I bind a "group" to a variable. In other words if I define a regex, how do I bind it to a variable like $controller, $id, $action
I would also like to be able to support the .json notation /user/id.json
Other things I have tried, which I thought would work:
"/$controller$id?$action?"{
constraints {
controller(matches:/\w+/)
id(matches:/\/\d+/)
action(matches:/\/\w+/)
}
}
also tried:
"/$controller/$id?/$action?"{
constraints {
controller(matches:/\w+/)
id(matches:/\d+/)
action(matches:/\w+/)
}
}

Answer 1

The grails way to deal with this is to set
grails.mime.file.extensions = true
in Config.groovy. This will cause Grails to strip off the file extension before applying the URL mappings, but make it available for use by withFormat
def someAction() {
withFormat {
json {
render ([message:"hello"] as JSON)
}
xml {
render(contentType:'text/xml') {
//...
}
}
}
For this you'd just need a URL mapping of "$controller/$id?/$action?"
I'm not aware of any way to use regular expressions in the way you want in the URL mappings, but you could get a forward mapping working using the fact that you can specify closures for parameter values that get evaluated at runtime with access to the other params:
"$controller/$a?/$b?" {
action = { params.b ?: params.a }
id = { params.b ? params.a : null }
}
which says "if b is set then use that as the action and a as the id, otherwise use a as the action and set id to null". But this wouldn't give you a nice reverse mapping, i.e. createLink(controller:'foo', action:'bar', id:1) wouldn't generate anything sensible, you'd have to use createLink(controller:'foo', params:[a:1, b:'bar'])
Edit
A third possibility you could try is to combine the
"/$controller/$id/$action"{
constraints {
controller(matches:/\w+/)
id(matches:/\d+/)
action(matches:/\w+/)
}
}
mapping with a complementary
"/$controller/$action?"{
constraints {
controller(matches:/\w+/)
action(matches:/(?!\d+$)\w+/)
}
}
using negative lookahead to ensure the two mappings are disjoint.