Define dynamic actions/slugs with Routers in PhalconPHP

Question

I have a website made in PHP Phalcon, and it has several controllers.

Now I need this website to receive words in the URL (example.com/WORD) and check if they exist in the database, but I must continue to support other controllers like example.com/aboutme.

After few hours of trying different methods and searching online I cannot find a way to accomplish this task. The closer intent was creating a Route to redirect non-existing actions to a new controller, but I cannot make this solution work.

Can you think on a solution that may work and share the code/idea? I am not adding any code because I could not get to do anything useful.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 16 '17 at 07:49

This should not be a problem at all. Here are sample routes:

// Default - This serves as multipurpose route definition
// I can use it to create non pretty urls if I don't want to define them. 
// Example: profiles/login, profiles/register - Don't need those pretty :)
$router->add('/:controller/:action/:params', ['controller' => 1, 'action' => 2, 'params' => 3]);
$router->add('/:controller/:action', ['controller' => 1, 'action' => 2]);
$router->add('/:controller', ['controller' => 1]);

// Product page - www.example.com/product-slug-here
$router->add('/{slug}', 'Products::view')->setName('product');

// Blog
$router->add('/blog/{slug}', 'Blog::view')->setName('blog');
$router->add('/blog', 'Blog::index')->setName('blog-short');

// Contacts - Pretty urls in native website language
$router->add('/kontakti', 'Blabla::contacts')->setName('contats');

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 17 '17 at 01:32

After all, rules did not worked, so I came out with a workaround. I am catching the the exception raised when a controller don't exist and running my code there. So far the only issue is the bitter taste of contributing to spaghetti code :-(

try{
    $application = new Application($di);
    echo $application->handle()->getContent();
}
catch(\Phalcon\Mvc\Dispatcher\Exception $e)
{
    $word = substr($e->getMessage(), 0, strpos($e->getMessage(), "Controller"));
    // RUN ESPECIFIC CODE HERE
}

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 31 '23 at 14:11

I see that the question is very old, but I found it while searching for a solution to the same problem, and what worked for me is adding the '/' for the controllers route:

 // Page Not Found - 404
$router->notFound(
    [
        'controller' => 'index',
        'action'     => 'pageNotFound',
    ]
);

// Blog page - www.example.com/blog-slug-here
$router->add(
    '/{slug}',
    [
        'controller'    => 'BlogPost',
        'action'        => 'index',
    ]
 )->setName('Blog-post');

$router->add('/:controller/:action/:params', 
    [
        'controller'    => 1, 
        'action'        => 2,
        'params'        => 3
    ]
);

$router->add('/:controller/:action',
    [
        'controller'    => 1, 
        'action'        => 2
    ]
);

$router->add('/:controller/', 
    [
        'controller'    => 1
    ]
);

$router->add(
    '/',
    [
        'controller'    => 'index',
        'action'        => 'index',
    ]
);

This way I can have a blog post URL like www.example.com/admin and an admin area as www.example.com/admin/

Define dynamic actions/slugs with Routers in PhalconPHP

3 Answers3