Allow more than one modifier type per provider

First off, sorry about naming confusion in purl. I agree it could be improved and documented better. Thanks for bearing with me.

I need to think about this more, but I'm not sure I like having multiple processors target the same provider.

Have you looked at writing a custom processor that is the funky combination of the domain & subdomain which you need? Recent changes in purls internals should make it fairly quick to write this.

Right, I'd forgotten about the need to store multiple values.

One other thing to consider is that we've been talking about moving storage of prefixes into a more sensible place as well. As you may have noticed there are some place where we pass a `null` value around to signify that a prefix map isn't needed and the and the provided value can be used natively. For example this happens with path_pair. I'm open to ideas about restructuring this.

I am using spaces_taxonomy and purl to create the appearance of several different sites. There is no global site as such, so we want to make sure that the user is always in a space. I think that having the ability to set the type (processor) per modifier would allow us to achieve the URL structure we're aiming for, something like:

www.example.com -> space 1 (domain type)

www.example.com/space2/ -> space 2 (path type)

www.example.com/space2/space3/ -> space 3 (path_pair type)

Obviously if this were possible then I think we need some sort of weighting system, or at least some rules for which type takes precedence over another. In the example above we would want path_pair to match before path, and path to match before domain.

Does anyone else have a similar use case? We are looking at writing a custom processor to achieve our needs but if there is more demand for this type of functionality then it may be worth looking at adding it to purl.

jmiccolis - it would be great to get your take on this, I know that you say that you don't like the idea of multiple processors targeting the same provider above, is this purely because of the additional complexity it would introduce? If you're really against this then how would you suggest implementing the use case I've outlined above?

Thanks!
John

Thanks Frando. Would you mind sharing your code for the custom processor? I think we'll go down the same route but when we tried to do a proof-of-concept we had trouble exposing the processor class and getting purl to recognise it. Would really appreciate it if you could share, either publicly or privately if that's not possible.

In case it's useful for anyone else, when I came back to this it seems relatively trivial to expose your own processor! Just implement hook_purl_processor and clear the cache. E.g.

function hook_purl_processor() {
    $plugins = array();
    $plugins['my_processor'] = array(
      'title' => t('My Processor'),
      'handler' => array(
        'path' => drupal_get_path('module', 'my_module') .'/plugins',
        'file' => 'my_processor.inc',
        'class' => 'my_processor',
      ),
    );
    return $plugins;
  }

hi, have you guys been able to implement this? i need this functionality as well.. i need both subdomain and path per modifier