I am playing with CouchDB a bit this weekend and I am trying to put together a basic application written in HTML and Javascript.

I wanted to use the XMLHttpRequest object to interact with CouchDB; this meant I had to host the code using the web server that is built into CouchDB (to avoid cross domain issues in the browser). However when I first moved the code over from my normal Apache server into the CouchDB server I tried to access the code with my browser at http://localhost:5984/_utils/myapplication and none of my external CSS or Javascript files would load (at least in Firefox).

What I noticed was that since I was using relative paths in the href and src attributes (i.e. <script scr="./file.js" ...) of the link and script tags, the trailing slash on the URL was required for the files to be included properly. I figured this out because when I accessed the same code at http://localhost:5984/_utils/myapplication/, everything worked as expected.

Typically web servers add that slash automatically for you, but for some reason CouchDB does not. To get around this I wrote a quick Javascript that I placed inline, just below the head tag to look for this case and correct it. The script is below.

if(String(window.location).substring((String(window.location).length - 1), String(window.location).length) != '/') {
    window.location = String(window.location) + '/';
}

Seems odd that CouchDB does not account for this.