嵌套类别的路由

Question

I have a category structure set up in my CakePHP application which supports nested categories. That is, a category can have a child and/or a parent. The database columns for the categories table are: id , parent_id , lft , rght , name , slug .

I've already written all the CRUD logic for categories and posts relating to those categories.

As an example, say I have a category called about and a sub-category called me . I would like URLs like mysite.com/about/me to show all the posts related to the me category.

I'm having trouble working out how to route this request. If I just do Router::connect('/:category', array('controller' => 'categories', 'action' => 'view')) it will only work for mysite.com/about , and I can't just do /:category/:category/:category because it isnt at all scale-able.

How can I achieve routing for nested categories?

Answer 1

You can use the * operator for routes .

If you know the routes will only have one sub-category, your route should be

Router::connect('/:category/*', 
                 array('controller' => 'categories', 'action' => 'view'))

That will match mysite.com/about/me and pass it to the action like this

CategoriesController->view('me')

me will be passed as parameter and you can do all the queries and etc inside that action.

If, however, the nesting of categories have a length you can't define, the approach is different. Let's say you also want to map an url like mysite.com/about/me/2012/march . Then the route rule can be

Router::connect('/:category/**', 
                 array('controller' => 'categories', 'action' => 'view'))

That double ** is referred in the docs as

Using a trailing double star, will capture the remainder of a URL as a single passed argument. This is useful when you want to use an argument that included a / in it

So, everything after the category will be passed as parameter. In this example it will call

CategoriesController->view('me/2012/march')

and in that action you'll have to do a parse of the parameter to get the nesting you want. I recommend extracting that function as a protected or private function in the controller

class Categories as AppController {
    public function view($url_params) {
        //it could be a string or an array or etc, depends on how you want to handle it
        $array = $this->_parseCategories($url_params);
    }

    protected function _parseCategories($stringUrl) {
        $subcategories = explode('/', $stringUrl);
        //add whatever else you want to do
        return $subcategories;
    }
}

You should adjust the routes as you need (I didn't include the passing of :category ), and also change the controller a bit, but it should be scalable enough