What is Route, where and how to define it? - zend-framework

Question

I have several modules in my zend application. On one of the view script of my modules, I created a URL as such
$links['create'] = $this -> url(array("controller" => "roles", "action" => "create"), "custom");
This brings an error, saying Route "custom" is not define.
What is Route? Where to define it and How?

Answer 1

In my bootstrap file i have initialized my routing by adding following function
public function _initRouting() {
// Get Front Controller Instance
$front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
// Get Router
$router = $front->getRouter();
$routedetialevent = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(
'/events/detail/:id',
array(
'controller' => 'events',
'action' => 'detail'
)
);
$routeregister = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(
'/index/register/:id',
array(
'controller' => 'index',
'action' => 'register'
)
);
$routerdetail = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(
'/commentaries/details/:id',
array(
'controller' => 'commentaries',
'action' => 'details'
)
);
$router->addRoute('post', $routedetialevent);
$router->addRoute('register', $routeregister);
$router->addRoute('detail', $routerdetail);
}
as i have added the custom route in my events, commentaries whenever i visit detail page i dont have to write id in my url so my url will be like
http://localhost/example/events/detail/3
If i wouldnt have added route than my url would be like
http://localhost/example/events/detail/id/3

Answer 2

The Zend Framework manual has pretty decent documentation about routes and the router, including descriptions of several ways to define routes.
At a very basic level, routes are used both to parse URLs into parameters (like which controller and action should be used), and to do the reverse: take parameters and produce a URL.
For your purposes, unless you want to change how ZF will build your URL, you can just drop the "custom" part off of your url call.