Question

I don’t know the first thing about doing queries in CakePHP OR doing routes in CakePHP so I don’t even know how to start to find a solution for my question. Maybe you can help.

I want users to be able to go to:

http://www.domain.com/movies/1

OR

http://www.domain.com/movie-nickname

Both would access the “pages” controller, “view” action. And they should both come up with the page id = 1.

(I don’t want them to simply go to http://www.domain.com/pages/1)

Each page has a nickname for the URL, but if left blank the url will be http://www.domain.com/CATEGORY/PAGE as shown in the first example.

If the nickname is not left blank, is there a way I can do a query inside my route that says “SELECT id FROM pages WHERE nickname = ‘nickname'”

On top of this, if the nickname in the pages table is “this that”, the URL should be http://www.domain.com/this-that, meaning the hyphen needs to be replaced with spaces and THEN execute the query.

I have the route for the first URL which is:

Router::connect(
    '/:category/:page',
    array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'view'),
    array(
        'pass' => array('page'),
        'page' => '[0-9]+',
        'category' => 'shows|music|games|books|hobbies'
    )
);

Is the second option I am looking for possible?

Answer 1

I figured out my custom routing.

App::uses('ClassRegistry', 'Utility');

// HOMEPAGE
Router::connect('/', array('controller' => 'index', 'action' => 'index'));

$requestURI = explode('/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
$scriptName = explode('/',$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']);

for($i= 0;$i < sizeof($scriptName);$i++)
        {
      if ($requestURI[$i]     == $scriptName[$i])
              {
                unset($requestURI[$i]);
            }
      }

$param = array_values($requestURI);

$param1 = $param[0]; // domain.com/page-nickname
$param2 = $param[1]; // domain.com/category_id/page_id

// convert 'page-nickname' to 'page nickname' which is what it would be in db
$pagelink = str_replace('-', ' ', $param1);

// initiate Page mode;
$pagesModel = ClassRegistry::init('Page');

// check if there is a matching page in the db that has link column like 'page nickname'
$matchedpage = $pagesModel->find('first', array(
    'conditions' => array('Page.link LIKE' => "$pagelink"), 'recursive' => '0'
));


// Cache::write('routepagelinks', $pagelinks);

// if there is a match
if($matchedpage['Page']['id']){
    Router::connect('/' . $param1, array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'view', 'page' => $matchedpage['Page']['id']), array(
    'pass' => array('page'),
    'page' => '[0-9]+'
    ));

// ... more custom routing if there is a match

}

// general routing info here


// if no page-nickname, routes page for domain.com/category_id/page_id
Router::connect(
'/:category/:page',
array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'view'),
array(
    'pass' => array('page'),
    'page' => '[0-9]+',
    'category' => 'shows|music|games|books|hobbies'
    )
);