Chapter 7.

Advanced routing

In the next section of this book we’re going to add a HTML form to our application so that users can create new snippets.

To make this work smoothly, we’ll first need to update our application routes so that requests to /snippet/create are handled differently based on the request method. Specifically:

For GET /snippet/create requests we want to show the user the HTML form for adding a new snippet.
For POST /snippet/create requests we want to process this form data and then insert a new snippet record into our database.

While we’re at it, there are a couple of other routing-related improvements that we’ll also make:

We’ll restrict all our other routes — which simply return information — to only support GET requests.
We’ll use clean URLs so that any variables are included in the URL path (like /snippet/view/123) and not appended as a query string (like /snippet/view?id=123).

Essentially, we want to rejig our application routes and handlers so that they end up looking like this:

Method	Pattern	Handler	Action
GET	/	home	Display the home page
GET	/snippet/view/:id	snippetView	Display a specific snippet
GET	/snippet/create	snippetCreate	Display a HTML form for creating a new snippet
POST	/snippet/create	snippetCreatePost	Create a new snippet
GET	/static/	http.FileServer	Serve a specific static file

As I mentioned earlier in the book, Go’s servemux doesn’t support method based routing or clean URLs with variables in them. There are some tricks you can use to get around this, but most people tend to decide that it’s easier to reach for a third-party package to help with routing.

In this section of the book we will:

Briefly discuss the features of a few good third-party routers.
Update our application to use one of these routers and demonstrate how to use method-based routing and clean URLs.