Consider a general term for dereferencing a URL name

[igbanam]

Right now, in templates, URL names are dereferenced using {% url "route:to:dereference" %}. In handlers, what seems like the same functionality is called reverse("route:to:dereference").

Could Marten consider changing reverse to url for the handlers as well?

marten/src/marten/routing/reverser.cr

Line 20 in 4ae28f0

def reverse(params : Nil | Hash(String | Symbol, Parameter::Types)) : Nil | String

[ellmetha]

Hey! 👋

The "Reverse URL resolution" concept is important to the framework and is heavily documented. The rationale behind this naming is that it performs the reverse operation of the route pattern matching process (where a route/handler association is resolved based on a given URL path). As such, given a route name and optional parameters, the #reverse method constructs the corresponding route if one exists. Marten uses this naming internally for its routing component (eg. Marten::Routing::Map#reverse method).

Additionally, handlers and templates are components that may not necessarily be used by the same audience: handlers will likely be written by Crystal developers while templates could be written by frontend developers that may not be familiar with the "reverse URL resolution" concept. That's why the url naming was chosen for the template tag corresponding to the #reverse method.

For these reasons, I don't think the reverse naming and its associated concept should go away. That said, I am open to introducing a #url alias for #reverse in handlers (or a reverse tag alias for templates). How does that sound?

[igbanam]

This alias is more what I was leaning towards, to be honest. This isn't a functionality change per se. It's just sugar to make a marten codebase seem more homogenous.

[ellmetha]

Added in 73778f8. 👌

[igbanam]

Fantastic. Thank you!