ADR 0010 — Record addresses name the record type in the plural

Status: accepted

Decision

Every address belonging to a record type names that type in the plural, and the singular form does not answer.

A record sits at <types>/<identifier>/, and every page belonging to it is a segment below that: <types>/<identifier>/<page>/. The collection sits at <types>/, and creating one at <types>/create/.

Projects follow this now. Samples already did. Datasets and measurements do not yet, and bringing them across is tracked separately.

Why

Both forms were in use, for no reason anyone recorded. A project was reachable at one prefix while the pages belonging to it mounted under the other. Nothing chose that; it accumulated. A reader who learns one address learns nothing about the next.

The plural is the form already published. It is the one appearing in links people may have saved and cited, so keeping it costs nothing and changing it would break references outside our control. The pages belonging to a record are newer and less likely to have been cited, which makes them the cheaper side to move.

A convention that holds for three of four record types is not a convention. The value is entirely in its being exceptionless — a developer adding a fifth record type should be able to derive its addresses without reading any existing ones.

Consequences

The creation route has to be declared ahead of the record route, or create is read as a record identifier and the creation page resolves to a lookup that fails. This is a real ordering requirement, not a stylistic one, and it carries its own test.

Pages that already belonged to a project changed address when it moved. That cost is accepted once per record type, and is the reason for doing the remaining types in a single pass rather than one at a time.

A record’s own address method is the single place any of this is reversed. Nothing outside it should construct a record’s address by name, so that a future move touches one place.