Having processed a GET request, I want to redirect the user to a new URL, handled by my app, which displays the results.

In the gin documentation I found two different ways to do this. One is to use gin’s redirect() function and the other is to use it’s router HandleContext() function. The cited documentation says redirect() should be used for a POST request or for a GET request but then says HandleContext() should be used for a “Router” redirect. I’m not sure I fully understand the implications of using one or the other.

The first use case given in the documentation cited above is:

r.GET("/test", func(c *gin.Context) {
    c.Redirect(http.StatusMovedPermanently, "http://www.google.com/")
})

What seems to be distinct here is that the redirecting is to an external URL, away from my app itself. The second use case, which is described as a ‘Router redirect’, is:

r.GET("/test", func(c *gin.Context) {
    c.Request.URL.Path = "/test2"
    r.HandleContext(c)
})
r.GET("/test2", func(c *gin.Context) {
    c.JSON(200, gin.H{"hello": "world"})
})

So this seems to be required if the URL for the redirect is a path handled by my app.

But this is a URL like any other. So why not just use c.redirect() for Router redirects?

Intuitively, this is the obvious thing to do. But I suspect it produces unexpected behaviour (or at least, behaviour I personally didn’t expect)

What’s wrong with using c.redirect() for Router redirects, and what’s the difference between it and router.HandleContext()?