Serving the right file suffix

Sometimes if you use applications other than the browser to open up links (i.e.: Excel), they behave better if the file served has the neat, correct suffix at the end.
This messes up all internal paths in Catalyst though. So I figured out that if I could clean up the suffix at the end of the URI, and keep it as the format parameter, I'd solved the problem. So here's the code:

# inside My::Catalyst::App

after 'prepare_path' => sub {
     my ($c) = @_;
     local $_ = $c->request->path;
     s/\.([a-z]+)$//i;
     $c->stash->{format} = lc $1 || 'html';
     $c->request->path($_);
};

Cleaning up parameters

I decided that one-letter parameters would be only for internal application use, so that all other can be directly used for querying data. That way I can separate them out before every action, by using a private action in the root controller like this:

sub begin : Private {
    my ( $self, $c) = @_;
    my ($p, $i);
    $p = $c->req->params;
    for (grep { /^\w$/ } keys %{$p}) {
         $i->{$_} = $p->{$_};
         delete $p->{$_}
    }
 
    $c->stash->{params} = $p;
    $c->stash->{int_params} = $i;
}

Now I have a set of separate parameters that I can use

• v = view
  
• f = format
  
• q = query
  
• p = page
  
• n = number per page
  
• s = sort
  
• c = columns
  
• l = language