Django - Redirect uppercase urls to lowercase - django

Question

In my Django apps, I have many urls including /(?P<project_name>[_\w]+)/.
The project_name is defined by users and it is an attribute of the Project model.
I've added a validator on the project_name to check if it's lowercase.
So new names are all lowercase but some old names include uppercase characters.
I would like to change all the names stored to make them lowercase but at the same time, I don't want users to get an error when trying to access to one of the url with the old project name including uppercase characters.
As I have many urls and many views, I don't want to update each to manually .lower() the project_name.
Is there a way to redirect all urls including /<project_NAME>/ to /<project_name>/?

Answer 1

Hacky way with decorators
You could create a decorator for all your views that use a project_name:
def project_lowercase(_func=None):
def checkLowercase(func):
#functools.wraps(func)
def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
request = args[0]
project_name = args[1]
if not project_name.islower():
return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse(your_url_name, kwargs{'project_name' = project_name.lower()))
return func(*args, **kwargs)
return wrapper
return checkLowercase(_func)
Replace your_url_name with whatever you named your url route, then import the function and add the decorator above each view function:
#project_lowercase
def view_project(request, project_name):
# ...
return "Hello World!"
Slugs would be better
Alternitively as suggested in the comments and a better solution you should use a slug to store urls for your projects, have a look here to see how to add them to your models and generate slugs.
To move your existing data to use slugs or just to update project names you can create a data migration that will alter existing data in your database.

Answer 2

The first option I would suggest is to avoid regular expressions, switch to path for your urlpatterns and use custom url converter for your project names.
In case you want to keep using regular expressions, you could restrict your pattern to only accept lower case project names /(?P<project_name>[_a-z0-9]+)/. After that add url pattern, which is (effectively) the same as your current one /(?P<project_name>\w+)/ (note missing _ - \w already includes that) to match all project names, including the legacy ones, the view for that pattern would redirect to your first view with the lower case project_name.