Problem with plugin routes and multilanguage in a Cakephp4 - plugins

Question

I've built a multilanguage NewsManager plugin that has a NewsController
I'm try to write routes in this plugin to be able to access to routes like /en/news-manager/news/, /en/news-manager/news/my-lastest-news, ...
Here is my code :
// in /plugins/NewsManager/config/routes.php
$routes->scope('/{lang}', function (RouteBuilder $routes) {
$routes->plugin('NewsManager', function (RouteBuilder $routes) {
$routes->connect('/news', ['controller' => 'News', 'action' => 'index'])
->setPatterns([
'lang' => 'en|fr'
])
->setPersist(['lang']);
$routes->connect('/news/{slug}', ['controller' => 'News', 'action' => 'view'])
->setPass(['slug'])
->setPatterns([
'lang' => 'en|fr'
])
->setPersist(['lang']);
});
});
When I try to access to /en/news-manager/news/ I have a Missing Controller error with the message NewsManagerController could not be found.
What am I doing wrong ?
(Note that when I write exactly the same code that the code above but in my App routes it works...)

Answer 1

For parsing requests, routes are being ordered by their template's static path portion, which is the porition of the template before the first routing element.
So in your case the static portion would be / for all the language routes, as they immediately start with the {lang} routing element. This will result in a first comes first served order, meaning since your fallback routes are being connected before the plugin routes, they will be processed and matched first, making your plugin routes inaccessible.
As mentioned in the comments, one solution would obviously be to remove the fallback routes. This isn't an uncommon thing to do, as bailing out early at routes lookup will avoid unneccsary processing until the code runs into a problem at controller lookup later on.
Another way would be to connect the fallback routes after the plugin routes. Plugin route loading will always be invokved after application routes loading, so the pretty much only way to achieve this, is to move connecting the respective application routes into the plugin routes loading mechanism, which has a slight workaround smell.
Basically, move those routes into Application::pluginRoutes() to after invoking the parent method:
// in src/Application.php
public function pluginRoutes(\Cake\Routing\RouteBuilder $routes): \Cake\Routing\RouteBuilder
{
// connect plugin routes
$routes = parent::pluginRoutes($routes);
// connect fallback routes
$routes->scope('/{lang}', function (\Cake\Routing\RouteBuilder $routes) {
$routes->fallbacks();
});
return $routes;
}