Question

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);

Answer 1

I tend to look at it this way:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.