[Koha-devel] Plack Middleware to isolate library branches via path

[Thomas Klausner]

Hi!

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 10:56:36AM +1000, dcook at prosentient.com.au wrote:
 
> The timing of your email is interesting! I was just reflecting the other day
> about how Koha can't work off anything but the root path. 

:-)

> I have a Catalyst app where I use the out of the box method $c->uri_for
> which constructs an absolute URI using the application root (e.g. /aaa/),
> but that would require rewriting Koha's templates. I use that same strategy

Most web frameworks and/or router implementations provide methods to 
generate links, and those methods should honor HTTP headers like 
X-Forwarded-For etc. I usually use Plack::Middleware::ReverseProxyPath
https://metacpan.org/pod/Plack::Middleware::ReverseProxyPath
which uses X-Forwarded-Script-Name and X-Traversal-Path to allow for a 
very flexible setup, if the apps/routers used support those headers to 
generate links (Catalyst does, AFAIK)

But I guess the reason that Koha cannot use somethink like this is that 
it generates a lot of links via literal strings in the templates. And 
changing this to use a method/function would be a lot of work!

Which is why I choose the rather ugly and probably not very stable 
approach to fix (hopefully..) the generated URLs after rendering using a 
regex...

> With your solution, how do you handle Javascript navigation that doesn't
> necessarily rely on HTML? (I can't think of any examples off the top of my
> head but I'm sure they must exist, although perhaps only on the Staff
> Interface...)

Currently we don't, but the users are as of now only starting to test 
the path-based branches. We'll see what problems they'll encounter. And 
we're only using this branch separation on the OPAC.

Greetings,
domm

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl                             https://domm.plix.at
for(ref bless{},just'another'perl'hacker){s-:+-$"-g&&print$_.$/}