Yii2 - nested resources best practice

Question

Using Yii2 framework I cannot find any built-in functionality to implement something called nested resources in Ruby on Rails (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#nested-resources)

For example, an Article has many Comments. So I want that comments related to an article will be accessed via /articles/1/comments URL when index action is used; via /articles/1/comments/create when create action is used and so on...

Do I have to add multiple action-methods to ArticlesController called actionIndexComments(), actionCreateComment()... ?

Or should I pass an ?article_id=1 parameter via GET and use it for filtering in CommentsController ?

Or should I maybe implement custom UrlManager class that can deal with nested routes? (maybe someone has already implemented it?)

What is the best practice for now?

I think it's best to have multiple actions – Justinas Jan 06 '15 at 12:17 — Justinas, Jan 06 '15 at 12:17

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 06 '15 at 12:39

You should be able to do this easily with the UrlManager. It also depends on where you want to put the actual actions. You can put them either in a article controller or comment controller

For example for the comments controller you can define rules like this:

'article/<article_id:\d+>/comments/create/' => 'comment/create',
'article/<article_id:\d+>/comments/' => 'comment/index',

In both cases you can access the article_id (in GET) in the create or index actions. You can do exactly the same thing if you want to put the actions in the article.

can you please help me, im new in yii, where should i actually define these rules? i have `teams` and `playes` and i want my url to be like `teams/1/player/create` where 1 is `team_id` — nooby, Dec 05 '16 at 12:47

jamlee · Answer 2 · 2016-01-12T12:11:27.493

4

For more universe:

'GET,HEAD v1/articles/<id:\d+>/comments' =>
    'v1/articles/comment/index',
'GET,HEAD v1/<article/<id:\d+>/comments/<id:\d+>' =>
    'v1/articles/comment/view',
'POST v1/articles/<id:\d+>/comments' =>
    'v1/articles/comment/create',
'PUT,PATCH v1/article/<id:\d+>/comments' =>
    'v1/articles/comment/update',
'DELETE v1/article/<id:\d+>/comments' =>
    'v1/articles/comment/delete',

edited Jan 12 '16 at 12:11

answered Dec 31 '15 at 07:21

jamlee

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 13 '16 at 15:18

In case it is related to the built-in REST Api and you are using yii\rest\UrlRule instead of yii\web\UrlRule then its $prefix property may help achieving that by doing:

'rules' => [
    [
        'class' => 'yii\rest\UrlRule', 
        'controller' => ['players' => 'v1/player', 'trophies' => 'v1/trophy'],
        'prefix' => 'teams/<team_id:\d+>',
    ],
],

Which will generate the required rules for the following endpoints:

/teams/1/players
/teams/1/players/2
/teams/1/trophies
/teams/1/trophies/4

There is also this extension built on top of that principle and also provides related helper actions.

Finally solution that works! The missing important trick was: 'controller' => ['players' => 'v1/player', 'trophies' => 'v1/trophy']. — Petr Pánek, Jan 20 '21 at 16:34

Yii2 - nested resources best practice

3 Answers3