May 9, 2007
CakePHP Routes
The documentation covering routes in CakePHP is a bit confusing, and doesn’t quite cover how you can you use paths in the URL as method parameters. I’ll cover how I used them in a recent app in this short article.
Routing in CakePHP is similar to using Apache’s mod_rewrite to give you pretty URLS, for example, mapping:
http://server/item/1 to http://server/items.php?id=1They are used in Cake so that you don’t require mod_rewrite/Apache to achieve such cleaned-up URLS.
Cake’s route documentation (look under Section 3)
http://manual.cakephp.org/chapter/configuration
In my application I wanted to get rid of the controller/action convention and rather have URLs like http://server/about and http://server/contact that are both served by one controller called Pages
My route file looks like this:
1 $Route->connect('/', array('controller' => 'pages'));
2 $Route->connect('/:action/*', array('controller' => 'pages',
'action' => ':action'));Line 1 says that any request for the root document should be handled by the Pages controller, and since no action was specified, the method will default to index().
The second line catches one or more path parameters and assigns the first one to :action, and the rest are caught by the asterisk (*) and passed along to the controller.
Example
http://server/about/cars/ford
:action => ‘about’
parameters => ‘cars’, ‘ford’
We then assign this route to the Pages controller, and to the action that was specified as the first path variable.
Inside pages_controller.php, we have something like this:
function about($page = 'default', $type = null) {
//code dealing with parameters
//error checking etc.
$this->render($chosen_page);
}In our example above, $page will equal ‘cars’ and $type will equal ‘ford’.
In this way you can have one controller serving a variety of different pages, out’ve one action - instead of the usual one action per page convention.
Man, thanks.
I really like that system.
I think I will use something similar in my Cash Flow system.
http://www.signaldev.com
Forgive me if this is a simple question, but how would I go about database interaction when doing this? I would like to pull the info on the index/about/contact pages from the database, but I don’t know how to give them a model when using this technique. The pages controller says it has no model, so how would I go about this? Thanks.
Looks like I answered my own question. It appears you can give the pages_controller a model and then do your logic in the respective methods.
I guess my question now is: Is this the right way to do this? Seems kind of funky, but it does work.
Yeh, make a Page model - you could then use the `Page` table in your database and store pages (id, name, content) kind’ve thing.
Then,
$content = $this->Page->findByName(’about’);
Are you sure
‘action’ => ‘:action’
is what you want? Isn’t that element for the default action?
thanks, you have saved me
works great, although the order of the routes are very important, so try them out
This was nice. I have looked for a way todo this.
It not nice ti see the controller name in the url.
This works fine with one controller.
How should I do to make this work with two controllers?