I have been learning how to program apps using the Mojolicious framework and I am stumped as to why you use route names. For example a route could say
$r->route('/cities/new')
->via('get')
->to(controller => 'cities', action => 'new_form')
->name('cities_new_form');
But what is the purpose of the name parameter? I am new to web frameworks, so maybe this has a trivial answer to it.
Naming the route allows you to reference it later if you want to generate a URL dynamically. With your example, you could do this later in your code:
my $link = $self->url_for( 'cities_new_form' )
and $link would automatically be populated with a URL ending in /cities/new. You can get fancy if your route has dynamic parts. For example:
$r->route( '/cities/:cityname' )
->via( 'get' )
->to( controller => 'cities', action => 'new_form' )
->name( 'cities_new_form' );
Then you can generate a URL like
my $link = $self->url_for( 'cities_new_form', cityname => 'newyork' );
And $link would end up with /cities/newyork.
These are trivial examples, but you can build up fairly complex stuff once your routes get more involved.
If you don't name the route, it gets a default name which is just a concatenation of the alphanumeric characters in it. That can get tedious for long routes so you can use names to abbreviate them.
See also Named Routes in the Mojolicious documentation.
Related
Hi I'm building REST api for an app, I have a requirement in URL
such that url should be something like this e.g
www.abc.com/api/param1/value1/param2/value2/param3/value3.... and so on
There are cases
case: The number of params are not limited it can change frequent
if today it is something like this
www.abc.com/api/param1/value1/param2/value2/param3/value3
tomorrow it can be like this
www.abc.com/api/param1/value1/param2/value2/param3/value3/param4/value4
Is there a configuration where once you configure the url pattern
and every thing go smooth
and in conrtoller params should contain this kind of key-value pair
{ "param1" => "value1","param2" => "value2","param3" => "value3"...and so on }
any suggestion !! how to achieve this ??
If your params are not fixed you can use wildcard in routing
for e.g
get 'items/list/*specs', controller: 'items', action: 'list'
def list
specs = params[:specs] # e.g, "base/books/fiction/dickens" #split it and place in a hash
end
Rails routing provides a way to specify fully custom routes with static and dynamic segments as explained in the Rails Routing Guide.
Your requirement should be achievable with
get '/api/param1/:param1/param2/:param2/...', to: 'controller#action'
You can use route scoping for this particular kind of problem . In other way it is nested routes
More details : http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#nested-resources
This is a example,
GET /magazines/:magazine_id/ads/:id/edit ads#edit
return an HTML form for editing an ad belonging to a specific magazine
I think this would be helpful for you.
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.
What does:
$this->url(array(), 'home');
and
$this->url(array('page' => 'services'), 'static-content');
actually do when using the zend framework?
That will build a url for eg:
echo $this->url(
array('controller' => 'foo', 'action' => 'bar', 'param1' => '1')
);
will get you
/foo/bar/param1/1
A little context, url is a Zend framework view helper that allows you to build full URLs based on a set parameters. From the official documentation regarding View Helpers - Initial Helpers:
url($urlOptions, $name, $reset, $encode): Creates a URL string based on a named route. $urlOptions should be an associative array of key/value pairs used by the particular route.
On the 1st parameter $urlOptions you can provide a variety of data like:
controller;
action;
named parameters for the controller/action you want.
The 2nd parameter $name relates to a given route.
Answering your question, the 1st example, $this->url(array(), 'home'); would generate the URL for you currently loaded controller/action using the home route.
The 2nd usage, $this->url(array('page' => 'services'), 'static-content');, would generate an URL for your currently load controller/action using the static-content route and passing a page argument with services as its value.
You can read all you need to know in the Zend_Controller_Router documentation.
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!
how can i append query strings to a url? i could of course do a (from controller action)
$currUrl = $this->getRequest()->getRequestUri();
$newUrl = $currUrl . '/something/else';
if the requestUri looks like /users thats fine. but what if the url looks like /users?page=1? then i will end up with something like /users?page=1/something/else which is wrong
That is not a reliable way to add parameters to the current request URI. Say for example that you're using the default module route, and your current URI is eg. /news. If you want to add params to the end, you should first append the action name, hence having: /news/index/something/else. You can see that it can become quite tedious to do this by hand. Zend Framework provides you methods to do this with ease. In your controller, you can do this to generate an URI based on the current one:
$router = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()->getRouter();
$url = $router->assemble(array('something' => 'somethingelse'));
If you want to keep the query string with the new URI, do after that:
if (!empty($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']))
$url .= '?'.$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];