Interesting Laravel routing url problems - laravel

Question

I've got (what is to me) an interesting url question.
This is my situation. I have what will be a user populated database, so I cannot be sure how many subareas I will have.
I will always have an area, one or more subareas, and a location that ends my url.
example: /area/subarea1/subarea2/location
This is slightly simplified from what I need. I need to be able to service the following urls as well;
/area/subarea1/location
/area/subarea1/subarea2/subarea3/location)
My routes look something like this:
Route::get('area/{subarea1}', 'SubareaController#show');
Route::get('area/{subarea1}/{location}', 'LocationController#show');
Route::get('area/{subarea1}/{subarea2}', 'SubareaController#show2');
Route::get('area/{subarea1}/{subarea2}/{location}', 'LocationController#show2');
So the problem here is that my routes are overriding each other, because they are essentially the same.
My question is this. Is there any way to differentiate these routes when they have the same url structure? And if not, is there a better way to handle multiple subareas between an area, and a location?
EDIT
Ok I've been tried naming my routes, but I can't seem to be able to use the named routes correctly with all my parameters in the view. I may look into the area/{subarea1}/subarea1/{subarea2}/subarea2 solution, even though I would rather not have the longer URL.

Answer 1

This happens because Laravel has no way to distinguish each route from the other. For example, it would route these 2 url's to the same action:
example.com/area/my-subarea-1/my-location
example.com/area/my-subarea-1/my-subarea-2
So you need different paths. Try this:
Route::get('area/subarea1/{subarea1}', 'SubareaController#show');
Route::get('area/subarea1/{subarea1}/location/{location}', 'LocationController#show');
Route::get('area/subarea1/{subarea1}/subarea2/{subarea2}', 'SubareaController#show2');
Route::get('area/subarea1/{subarea1}/subarea2/{subarea2}/location/{location}', 'LocationController#show2');