In Flask is there a way to ignore a request for a route that doesn't exist

Question

I'm writing an app using Flask. I have a set of routes and they work. What I want to do on the client side is to ignore any requests to invalid URLs. That is I do not want to render any 404/error pages in the app. I would like an alert that says the URL is invalid and for the browser to simply stay on the same page.

I don't want to be checking the URLs in JavaScript on the client, as this would expose them.

I have a route which responds correctly to unknown URLs:

@app.errorhandler(404) 
def non_existant_route(error):
   return jsonify({"no":"such page"})

If I delete the return statement I get a 500 error. I can't use abort()

Does this idea violate some HTTP principle?

Thanks

Answer 1

I've decided a solution to this is too hard! I can not find any way to get the browser to ignore a response. There is no response header for 'do nothing'. If there was we would probably never see a webserver error again, which would not be good.

I could ajaxify all the requests as a way to grab the response headers and analyze them before any rendering or redirecting happens. That starts to break all the navigation (back buttons at least) and the pretty URLs. I could bung in a JS routing framework etc, and while I'm leaning how it works I'm not building my app (I already have enough to learn!)

@app.errorhandler(404)
def page_not_found(error):
    return redirect(url_for('index'))

If you come up with something great post it anyway, I'm not the first to ask this question, and probably not the last.

Thanks