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URL to Page Mapping

Most pages in OpenML are represented by a folder in /openml_OS/views/pages/frontend The contents of this folder will be parsed in the template frontend_main.php template, as described in [[backend]]. In this section we explain the way an URL is mapped to a certain OpenML page.

URL Anatomy

By default, CodeIgniter (and OpenML) accepts a URL in the following form: http://www.openml.org/index.php/<controller>/<function>/<p1>/<pN>/<free> The various parts in the URL are divided by slashes. Every URL starts with the protocol and server name (in the case of OpenML this is http://www.openml.org/). This is followed by the bootstrap file, which is always the same, i.e., index.php. The next part indicates the controller that needs to be invoked; typically this is frontend, rest_api or data, but it can be any file from the openml_OS folder controllers. Note that the suffix .php should not be included in the URL.

The next part indicates which function of the controller should be invoked. This should be a existing, public function from the controller that is indicated in the controller part. These functions might have one or more parameters that need to be set. This is the following part of the URL (indicated by p1 and pN). The parameters can be followed by anything in free format. Typically, this free format is used to pass on additional parameters in name - value format, or just a way of adding a human readable string to the URL for SEO purposes.

For example, the following URL http://www.openml.org/index.php/frontend/page/home invokes the function page from the frontend controller and sets the only parameter of this function, $indicator, to value home. The function page loads the content of the specified folder ($indicator) into the main template. In this sense, the function page can be seen as some sort of specialized page loader.

URL Shortening

Since it is good practice to have URL’s as short as possible, we have introduced some logic that shortens the URL’s. Most importantly, the URL part that invokes index.php can be removed at no cost, since this file is always invoked. For this, we use Apache’s rewrite engine. Rules for rewriting URL’s can be found in the .htaccess file, but is suffices to say that any URL in the following format http://www.openml.org/index.php/<controller>/<function>/<params> can due to the rewrite engine also be requested with http://www.openml.org/<controller>/<function>/<params>

Furthermore, since most of the pages are invoked by the function page of the frontend controller (hence, they come with the suffix frontend/page/page_name) we also created a mapping that maps URL’s in the following form http://www.openml.org/<page_name> to http://www.openml.org/frontend/page/<page_name> Note that Apache’s rewrite engine will also add index.php to this. The exact mapping can be found in routes.php config file.

Additional Mappings

Additionally, a mapping is created from the following type of URL: http://www.openml.org/api/<any_query_string> to http://www.openml.org/rest_api/<any_query_string> This was done for backwards compatibility. Many plugins make calls to the not-existing api controller, which are automatically redirected to the rest_api controller.

Exceptions

It is important to note that not all pages do have a specific page folder. The page folders are a good way of structuring complex GUI’s that need to be presented to the user, but in cases where the internal state changes are more important than the GUI’s, it might be preferable to make the controller function print the output directly. This happens for example in the functions of rest_api.php and free_query.php (although the former still has some files in the views folder that it refers to).