flatpages chokes if the url doesn't begin and end with a slash (but doesn't validate for it)

[Jared Forsyth]

There's a helpful hint under the 'url' for creating a new flatpage: "Make sure to have leading and trailing slashes." The strange thing is that it doesn't validate for this, and if you omit the trailing slash, you get a very frustrating 404 when trying to view your finished flatpage.
This patch changes 2 lines, to make the validation regex for the url check for leading and trailing slashes.

[Jared Forsyth]

patch

[Russell Keith-Magee]

Checking for the trailing slash isn't necessarily a given -- you only need the trailing slash if APPEND_SLASH is enabled.

[Russell Keith-Magee]

Also - please generate patches against the root of the tree.

[Jared Forsyth]

As far as testing goes, it seems to be a UI change, and therefore hard to unittest -- unless you would like me to write some cases for the regex
to manually examine:

enable APPEND_SLASH (well it is by default), and enable CommonMiddleware (default again)

• on the admin page, create a new flatpage, but omit the trailing slash in the URL
  
• (should fail to validate)

disable APPEND_SLASH

• create a flatpage, omit the slash
  
• (should accept)

[Russell Keith-Magee]

Django's testing tools have all sorts of utils for checking form validation. Tests aren't optional here.

Also - PEP8: Constants (url_regex) should be in CAPITALS.

[Jared Forsyth]

I looked around and there didn't seem to be any docs/readme on *how* to add tests to django (other than the basic this is a unittest) -- I mean conventions, organization and the like. so bear with me.
I created a new directory in /tests/regressiontests (I figured that was the right place for it...like I said, there didn't seem to be any intuitive difference between regressiontests and modeltests), called "flatpage_tests", and I put in some URL validation tests. is there anything I should change?

btw. thanks so much for your guidance and council; as you can probably tell I'm fairly new at this. much appreciated.

[Jared Forsyth]

now with tests!

[patchhammer]

flatpages_admin_trunk.diff fails to apply cleanly on to trunk

[Claude Paroz]

Updated patch

[Claude Paroz]

The above attached patch is an updated version of a previous patch. It depends on #17125 to be committed (possibility to modify regex of a RegexField after init). I choose this way of updating the regex because the current trend in Django is to prevent global state. If in the future, settings might vary in the same code base, this patch might be better to address the issue.

[Karen Tracey]

It looks to me like you will now (with the latest patch) get a validation error if you are missing the trailing slash...but the error message will be:

This value must contain only letters, numbers, dots, underscores, dashes, slashes or tildes.

correct? That's a pretty confusing error message if what you have supplied does in fact contain only letters, etc. and the actual problem is that you are missing a trailing slash.

[Claude Paroz]

Implement check in clean_url instead of regex

[Claude Paroz]

Fair concern. Updated patch that tests for slashes in clean_url instead of using the regex to check it. Now the message errors are indeed more precise.

[Aymeric Augustin]

In [17402]:

Fixed #12972 -- Validated that flatpages URLs start and (when appropriate) end with a slash. Thanks jabapyth, claudep and kmtracey.