Hierarchical CherryPy

Forging ahead on my time tracking web application, I ran into a little problem with CherryPy/TurboGears. Specifically, it has to do with creating hierarchical URL trees that look like "http://.../customers/<customer_id>/". What I'd like to be able to do is something like this:

class Root(controllers.Root):
   def __init__(self):
       self.customers=Customers()

class Customers(controllers.Root):
   def lookup(self, custid):
       'Some lookup function which will continue traversing the URL'
       self.customer=Customer(custid)

class Customer(controllers.Root):
   @turbogears.expose(html="ct.templates.customer")
   def index(self, arg):
       ...

For now, I've overridden the __getattr__ method of the "Customers" class to do this, but it looks like TurboGears looks up the root.customers.cust_id about four times per request, so it seems a little inefficient. CherryPy's default method won't work either, because once you hit default, there's no more traversing. I think Quixote has something that handles this, but it's been a while since I looked at it. Any suggestions?

Categories: python, turbogears, web, cherrypy