Question

I want to ask you for best solution for the router.

I have some tables in my database (articles, pages, categories etc.) which all has IDs.
I want to generate specific URL for each of them, eg. /en/article/25-This-is-an-test-article.

But how to get rid of that /article, /page, … ? Users don’t want to see it – it just increases the length of url …

My first idea was simple router table:

CREATE TABLE `router` (
  `id` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `type` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `entity_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

But there is one fatal problem – It’s impossible to set foreign key for the enitity_id column because it should refer to more columns and that is not possible in SQL.

My question is:
Do you think that I should stick with that solution (and ignore the foreign key )
or should I forgt about it and append the type in the URL ?

Answer 1

I want /en/article/55-something to become /en/55-something – with
the best performance, with the best and cleanest way (the problem is
WHERE and HOW to save the info that 55-something IS an article, not
the page)

The best place for that information is right there in the URL, so that you don’t have to muck about with flimsy, best-guess lookups.

Short answer: you’re already doing it properly.