Zend routing: removing null parameters from the URL - zend-framework

If I have a route which is defined like this:
/event/:id/:instance_id/view
It appears in the URL like this when both parameters are set.
example.com/event/1/15/view
However, instance_id is optional, and therefore may be null, with the URL looking like this (as created by the url helper):
example.com/event/1//view
I want it to look like this:
example.com/event/1/view
How do I remove the unnecessary forward slash?

The above question is for Zend 1 and the below solution is for Zend 2, so please dis-regard my answer.
Your route does not say 'instance_id' is optional. You can achieve this by doing this
'route' => '/event/:id[/:instance_id]/view',
It should fix the url problem. Also ideally, 'view' should be after 'event', if it is possible in your scenario.
'route' => '/event/view/:id[/:instance_id]',
Any fix text should ideally come up first in the route and anything optional last.

Related

CAKEPHP3 REST API point to a different controller?

I believe I am missing something here. I am trying to point a route to a custom controller:
Router::scope('/myAPI/', function ($routes) {
$routes->extensions(['json', 'xml']);
$routes->resources('some_value',
[
'controller'=>'SomeValue',
'only' => ['index', 'create', 'update', 'delete'],
'id'=>'[0-9]+'
]);
});
Therefore the URL I am wanting is ~mydomain~/myAPI/some_value.
I would want this to point to the SomeValueController instead of looking for some_valueController. However the controller definition is ignored in this case and instead cakephp3 looks for some_valueController instead which I would rather avoid to try and keep with cakephp's naming conventions (and make use of the cake bake console to create a lot of controllers for models for me) but I would like to specify this custom URL.
What have I missed here?
Thanks,
Nevermind, if you TitleCase the name it works:
$routes->resources( 'SomeValue',
[
'only' => ['index', 'create', 'update', 'delete'],
'id'=>'[0-9]+'
]);
This allows the URL of some_value and points to the correct controller.
Posted just in case it helps someone else.

Use route prefix with RESTful routes in CakePHP

Working on building an API and would like to use RESTful routes.
I got it to work just fine like this:
http://www.mysite.com/events.json // returns json results with my events
http://www.mysite.com/events/123.json // returns json results with event of id '123'
BUT - I want to be able to do this using an 'api' prefix.
So, I added the api Routing prefix:
Configure::write('Routing.prefixes', array('admin', 'api'));
And changed my actions from 'view' and 'index' to 'api_view' and 'api_index'.
But now it doesn't work. (eg. I have to write the action name or it won't find the correct one based on HTTP.
The end goal would be to be able to do something like this:
GET http://www.mysite.com/api/1.0/events.json // loads events/api_index()
GET http://www.mysite.com/api/1.0/events/123.json // loads events/api_view($id)
DELETE http://www.mysite.com/api/1.0/events/123.json // loads events/api_delete($id)
...etc
I ended up having to just write the routes manually:
Router::parseExtensions('json', 'xml');
Router::connect('/api/:version/:controller/:id/*',
array('[method]'=>'GET', 'prefix'=>'api', 'action'=>'view'),
array('version'=>'[0-9]+\.[0-9]+', 'id'=>'[0-9a-fA-F]{8}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{12}'));
Router::connect('/api/:version/:controller/*',
array('[method]'=>'GET', 'prefix'=>'api', 'action'=>'index'),
array('version'=>'[0-9]+\.[0-9]+'));
Router::connect('/api/*', array('controller'=>'events', 'action'=>'index', 'ext'=>'html'));
Notes:
The [method] is what forces the HTTP type (eg. RESTful)
The parseExtensions() makes it so you can have it display the data in different formats automatically by changing the extension in your URL.
The last Router:: line was just a catchall for anything /api/ that didn't match - it forwarded it to the homepage. Eventually I'll probably just route this to an API error page.
The 'ext'=>'html' of the last Router:: line was to keep parseExtensions from trying to use whatever extension was in the URL - if it's redirecting for reasons they made the call wrong, I just want it to go back to the homepage (or whatever) and use the normal view.
Try something like this.
Router::connect('/:api/:apiVersion/:controller/:action/*',
array(),
array(
'api' => 'api',
'apiVersion' => '1.0|1.1|'
)
);
With prefix routing
Router::connect('/:prefix/:apiVersion/:controller/:action/*',
array(),
array(
'prefix' => 'api',
'apiVersion' => '1.0|1.1|'
)
);
Will match only valid API versions like 1.0 and 1.1 here. If you want something else use a regex there.
I know this is an old post, but there is a routing method called mapResources which creates the special method based routing for you.
http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/development/rest.html
You put it in routes.php like so:
Router::mapResources(array('controller1', 'controller2'));
The docs have a nice little table showing how the requests are mapped to different actions, which you can always override if you need to.

Why Zend_View_Helper_Url returns relative path when using the default route and absolute path when using a custom route?

I have an application running on Zend Framework 1.12 and I am using the URL view helper. I also have a few custom routes which I use with the URL helper to clean the code.
When I use a format such as this:
$this->url(array('module' => 'myapp', 'controller' => 'index', 'action' => 'index'), 'default', true)
The resulting string is a relative path to the action - /myapp/index/index
But when I use a custom route as such:
$this->url(array('var' => 'value'), 'custom-route', true)
The resulting string is an absolute path - http://www.domain.com/custom-route
I don't understand why is this happening and I can't find any information about this behavior online. Furthermore, I wish to know if there's a way to prevent it from happening and produce consistency in the way the URL view helper works (preferably to always return a relative path).
Thanks.
I think this is as simple as your first example being a default type Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Module route that is normally relative.
Your second example is a named route so it needs to include the base url in order to be valid. I don't believe rewritten routes can be relative as the route may or may not refer to an actual location.
I've done some limited testing and I believe that if you set your baseUrl value the first example will also include the host address. So for consistency your urls will always be absolute.
//application.ini
resources.frontController.baseurl = http://www.domain.com
Hope this helps.

Fetching Zend Framework URL parameters

I'm building my first Zend Framework application and I want to find out the best way to fetch user parameters from the URL.
I have some controllers which have index, add, edit and delete action methods. The index action can take a page parameter and the edit and delete actions can take an id parameter.
Examples
http://example.com/somecontroller/index/page/1
http://example.com/someController/edit/id/1
http://example.com/otherController/delete/id/1
Until now I fetched these parameters in the action methods as so:
class somecontroller extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
public function indexAction()
{
$page = $this->getRequest->getParam('page');
}
}
However, a colleague told me of a more elegant solution using Zend_Controller_Router_Rewrite as follows:
$router = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()->getRouter();
$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(
'somecontroller/index/:page',
array(
'controller' => 'somecontroller',
'action' => 'index'
),
array(
'page' => '\d+'
)
);
$router->addRoute($route);
This would mean that for every controller I would need to add at least three routes:
one for the "index" action with a :page parameter
one for the "edit" action with an :id parameter
one for the "delete" action with an :id parameter
See the code below as an example. These are the routes for only 3 basic action methods of one controller, imagine having 10 or more controllers... I can't imagine this to be the best solution. The only benefit that i see is that the parameter keys are named and can therefore be omitted from the URL (somecontroller/index/page/1 becomes somecontroller/index/1)
// Route for somecontroller::indexAction()
$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(
'somecontroller/index/:page',
array(
'controller' => 'somecontroller',
'action' => 'index'
),
array(
'page' => '\d+'
)
);
$router->addRoute($route);
// Route for somecontroller::editAction()
$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(
'somecontroller/edit/:id',
array(
'controller' => 'somecontroller',
'action' => 'edit'
),
array(
'id' => '\d+'
)
$router->addRoute($route);
// Route for somecontroller::deleteAction()
$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(
'somecontroller/delete/:id',
array(
'controller' => 'somecontroller',
'action' => 'delete'
),
array(
'id' => '\d+'
)
$router->addRoute($route);
I tend to look at it this way:
Determine processing requirements.
What does each "action" need? An edit action and a delete action probably require an :id param. An add action and a list action probably do not. These controllers/actions then consume the params and do the processing.
Note: You can write these comtrollers/actions without any reference to the urls that bring visitors there. The actions simply expect that their params will be delivered to them.
Decide (!) what url's you want.
In general, I find the the (/:module/):controller/:action part of the url largely works fine (except for top-level relatively-static pages like /about, where I often put the actions on an IndexController (or a StaticController) and resent having to include the /index prefix in the url.
So, to handle posts, you might want urls like:
/post - list all posts, probably with some paging
/post/:id - display a specific post
/post/:id/edit - edit a specific post
/post/:id/delete - delete a specific post
/post/add - add a post
Alternatively, you might want:
/post/list - list all posts, probably with some paging
/post/display/:id - display a specific post
/post/edit/:id - edit a specific post
/post/delete/:id - delete a specific post
/post/add - add a post
Or any other url scheme. The point is, you decide the url's you want to expose.
Create routes...
...that map those urls to controllers/actions. [And make sure that whenever you render them, you use the url() view-helper with the route-name, so that a routing change requires no changes to your downstream code in your actions or views.
Do you end up writing more routes this way? Yeah, I find that I do. But, for me, the benefit is that I get to decide on my urls. I'm not stuck with the Zend defaults.
But, as with most things, YMMV.
It all depends on your exact requirements. If you simply want to pass one or two params, the first method will be the easiest. It is not practical to define route for every action. A few scenarios where you would want to define routes would be:
Long urls - If the parameter list for a particular action is very long, you might want to define a route so that you can omit the keys from the request and hence shorten the url.
Fancy urls - If you want to deviate from the normal controller/action url pattern of the Zend Framework, and define a different url pattern for your application (eg, ends with ".html")
Slugs / SEO friendly URLs
To take the example of a blog, you might want to define routes for blog posts urls so that the url is SEO friendly. At the same time, you may want to retain the edit / delete / post comment etc urls to remain the ZF default and use $this->getRequest->getParam() to access the request parameters in that context.
To sum up, an elegant solution will be a combination of routes and the default url patterns.
In a previous answer #janenz00 mentioned "long urls" as one of the reasons for using routes:
Long urls - If the parameter list for a particular action is very long, you might want to define a route so that you can omit the keys from the request and hence shorten the url.
Let's say we have an employee controller with an index action that shows a table of employees with some additional data (such as age, department...) for each employee. The index action can take the following parameters:
a page parameter (required)
a sortby parameter (optional) which takes one column name to sort by (eg age)
a dept parameter (optional) which takes a name of a department and only shows the employees that are working in that department
We add the following route. Notice that when using this route, we cannot specify a dept parameter without specifying a sortby parameter first.
$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(
'employee/index/:page/:sortby/:dept',
array(
'controller' => 'employee',
'action' => 'index')
);
If we would fetch these parameters in our action methods instead, we could avoid this problem (because the parameter keys are specified in the url):
http://example.com/employee/index/page/1/dept/staff
I might be looking at it the wrong way (or might not see the full potential of routing), but to me the only two reasons for using routes are:
If your urls don't conform to the traditional /module/controller/action pattern
If you want to make your urls more SEO-friendly
If your sole reason for using routes is to make use of the named parameters, then I think it's better to fetch these parameters in your action methods because of two reasons:
Keeping the number of routes at a minimum will reduce the amount of time and resources spent by the router
Passing in the parameter keys in the url allows us to make use of more complex urls with optional parameters.
Any thoughts or advice on this topic are more than welcome!

Using Zend Routes? to customized url

This is getting me confused.
How do I customize /state/state_name to be replaced by /state/state_name.php?
Initially state_name is a variable and I don't want each of the state to be an action in my StateController. Instead, I would like to take that variable and process it in a specific action loadAction() to deal with the contents.
This is because the url /state/state_name.php is already SEO optimized and I want it to stay in that form using Zend Framework.
Thanks for any help. Any suggestions would be gladly welcomed!
Maybe something like:
$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex(
'state/([^/]+)\.php',
array(
'controller' => 'state',
'action' => 'load',
),
array(
'state_name' => 1,
),
'state/%s.php'
);
But why is is so important to keep the .php suffix? If anything, it unnecessarily exposes the underlying server-side technology employed to construct the page. What if you later change the entire site to Ruby On Rails or to Django? Why tie yourself to PHP?
If you are really sweet for a suffix, then I'd imagine that .htm or .html is better. But even that leads you down a path with a potentially bad smell. What if you want to use this same controller to be the endpoint of an AJAX request that returns JSON or XML data?
Personally, I'd bail on the suffix.