Multiple routes to same Laravel resource controller action - laravel

Question

I like to use resource controllers in Laravel, as it makes me think when it comes to data modelling. Up to now I’ve got by, but I’m now working on a website that has a public front-end and a protected back-end (administration area).
I’ve created a route group which adds an “admin” prefix, like so:
Route::group(array('before' => 'auth', 'prefix' => 'admin'), function()
{
Route::resource('article', 'ArticleController');
Route::resource('event', 'EventController');
Route::resource('user', 'UserController');
});
And I can access the methods using the default URL structure, i.e. http://example.com/admin/article/1/edit.
However, I wish to use a different URL structure on the front-end, that doesn’t fit into what resource controllers expect.
For example, to access an article, I’d like to use a URL like: http://example.com/news/2014/06/17/some-article-slug. If this article has an ID of 1, it should (under the hood) go to /article/1/show.
How can I achieve this in Laravel? In there some sort of pre-processing I can do on routes to match dates and slugs to an article ID, and then pass that as a parameter to my resource controller’s show() method?

Answer 1

Re-visiting this, I solved it by using route–model binding and a pattern:
$year = '[12][0-9]{3}';
$month = '0[1-9]|1[012]';
$day = '0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01]';
$slug = '[a-z0-9\-]+';
// Pattern to match date and slug, including spaces
$date_slug = sprintf('(%04d)\/(%02d)\/(%02d)\/(%s)', $year, $month, $day, $slug);
Route::pattern('article_slug', $date_slug);
// Perform the route–model binding
Route::bind('article_slug', function ($slug) {
return Article::findByDateAndSlug($date_slug);
});
// The actual route
Route::get('news/{article_slug}', 'ArticleController#show');
This then injects an Article model instance into my controller action as desired.

Answer 2

One simple solution would be to create one more route for your requirement and do the processing there to link it to the main route. So, for example:
//routes.php
Route::get('/arical/{date}/indentifier/{slug}', array (
'uses' => 'ArticleController#findArticle'
));
//ArticleContoller
public function findArticle($date,$slug){
$article = Article::where('slug','=','something')->first(); //maybe some more processing;
$article_id = $article->id;
/*
Redirect to a new route or load the view accordingly
*/
}
Hope this is useful.

Answer 3

It seems like if Laravel 4 supports (:all) in routing, you would be able to do it with ease, but unfortunately (:all) is not supported in Laravel 4.
However, Laravel 4 allows detecting routes by regular expression, so we can use ->where('slug', '.*').
routes.php: (bottom of the file)
Route::get('{slug}', 'ArticleController#showBySlug')->where('slug', '.*');
Since Laravel will try to match the top most route in routes.php first, we can safely put our wildcard route at the bottom of routes.php so that it is checked only after all other criteria are already evaluated.
ArticleController.php:
class ArticleController extends BaseController
{
public function showBySlug($slug)
{
// Slug lookup. I'm assuming the slug is an attribute in the model.
$article_id = Article::where('slug', '=', $slug)->pluck('id');
// This is the last route, throw standard 404 if slug is not found.
if (!$article_id) {
App::abort(404);
}
// Call the controller's show() method with the found id.
return $this->show($article_id);
}
public function show($id)
{
// Your resource controller's show() code goes here.
}
}
The code above assumes that you store the whole URI as the slug. Of course, you can always tailor showBySlug() to support a more advanced slug checking.
Extra:
You could also do:
Route::get('{category}/{year}/{slug}', 'ArticleController#showBySlug')->where('slug', '.*');
And your showBySlug() would just have additional parameters:
public function showBySlug($category, $year, $slug)
{
// code
}
Obviously you can extend to month and day, or other adaptations.