In general, I fail to see the benefit of that. URLs are organized like folders,
each part can be represented as s sub-folder. How would you organize your data:
- Have one big folder and throw in all events and all galleries in the same
folder, just organized by name
- Have two subfolders named "events" and "galleries" and organize your data in
those two folders by name
The first one roughly translates to your static routing example. The second
approach translates to something like the following (untested) routing config
<route pattern="^/galleries" name="gallery" module="Galleries">
<route pattern="^/(galname:\S+)" name=".gallery" action="Gallery">
<route pattern="^$" name=".index" action=".Index" />
</route>
</route>
<route pattern="^/events" name="events" module="Events">
<route pattern="^/(eventname:\S+)" name=".event" action="Event">
<route pattern="^$" name=".index" action=".Index" />
<route pattern="^edit/$" name=".edit" action=".Edit" />
</route>
</route>
That solves most of your matching problems. It also provides a natural place
where to hook in a "view all galleries" and "display upcoming events" page. And
as a bonus, search engines love well structured url schemata.
If you're writing a CMS, you should at any point have a knowledge what kind of
item you're handling and thus be able to use the proper routes. All items
should by default use the canonical urls laid out by the routing scheme and
should always be retrievable by using that url. This provides the visitor with
a simple scheme of how urls are laid out and how to navigate the page. You
should also include a <link rel="canonical" ...> element in the head of the
page pointing to the canonical url for the item. However, sometimes the user of
the CMS wishes to assign additional shortcut urls to specific items of any
kind. There's multiple ways of solving that:
- You can provide the user with a way to define a mapping from short url to the
canonical url and dynamically generate a rewrite config. That's probably the
fastest way since the webserver does all the rewriting, but its technically a
bit complex. You need to take extra care that the config is valid, since
breaking it would break the whole webserver config, you may need to restart the
webserver after changes were made, ...
- Same as above, but don't generate a rewrite config. Have a catch-all route at
the end of the routing with a callback that resolves the short url and redirect
to the long url from there. This is a relatively simple solution, however, the
url changes for the user and it requires one extra roundtrip.
- You can provide the user with an option to map a short url to any specified
item. Then, in the Error404 Action you can try and recover - look up the short
url in your mapping and forward to the appropriate action. This may involve
elaborate logic in the 404 action. No extra roundtrip for the redirect, the url
does not change.
The last two options may put quite a bit of strain on your database server
since every false url (as in "does not point to a valid page") will result in a
database query. You may want to cache the mapping in a memcache server or
similar to speed things up
Hope that helps
felix
On Jan 5, 2010, at 10:39 AM, Michal wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is it possible to have routing determined (more or less) at runtime?
> I'm thinking that in a CMS-type app, a user might want to choose what
> a route maps to: say to a gallery action or an events calendar action.
> Each of these actions could have different sub-routes. Static-ly, I
> would do it something like (non-working example):
>
> <route pattern="^(galname:\S+/" name="gallery" module="gallery">
> <route pattern="^$" name=".index" action="Index" />
> </route>
>
> <route pattern="^(eventname:\S+)/" name="events" module="events">
> <route pattern="^$" name=".index" action="Index" />
> <route pattern="^edit/$" name=".edit" action="Edit" />
> </route>
>
> The issue with the above example is that the "gallery" route would
> always be matched, and the "events" one would not. I need some way to
> dynamically choose at runtime which one. A few ideas:
>
> - Have a callback in each route. The callback would query the database
> (and possibly cache the result) to see if the current route should
> match.
> - Use a modified routing class. I'm not sure quite how to modify it though.
> - Dynamically generate routing.xml itself. This could either be on
> every request (somehow?), or just when a user makes a change.
> - Don't really use routing.xml at all: have a "catch all" route that
> maps to a "Control" action, that then processes the URL and forwards
> to the correct action.
>
> I'm not sure in which direction to go. Any suggestions?
>
> Michal.
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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Felix Gilcher
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