Laravel routing url with variable order of parameters - laravel-4

Question

I am looking at routing to a Controller for GET URL whose parameters can vary in number or the order in which they appear in the URL. There could be many such combinations and I want to invoke the same controller action for all of these URLs
Examples of how my URLs could look like:
Route::get('route1/id/{id}',
'Controller1#controllerAction1');
Route::get('route1/id/{id}/name/{name}',
'Controller1#controllerAction1');
Route::get('route1/name/{name}',
'Controller1#controllerAction1');
Route::get('route1/id/{id}/name/{name}/orderby/{orderby}',
'Controller1#controllerAction1');
Route::get('route1/id/{id}/orderby/{orderby}',
'Controller1#controllerAction1');
Also in the Controller action, I ultimately want to break this query string into an array. For the second example mentioned above, I want the query string id/{id}/name/{name} to be converted to array ('id' => {id}, 'name' => {name})
To invoke the same controller action for all different variations of the URLs, I have the following code in my routes.php:
Route::get('route1{all}', 'Controller1#controllerAction1')->where('all', '.*')
which seems to invoke the "controllerAction1" of Controller1 for the different types of URLs mentioned above.
And in the function controllerAction1, I am doing
$route_input = Route::input('all');
var_dump($route_input);
which prints "/id/1/name/xyz" when I hit http://example.com/laravel/public/route1/id/1/name/xyz
I would like to know if:
Doing Route::get('route1{all}',
'Controller1#controllerAction1')->where('all', '.*') is the right
method to invoke same action for variable combination of get
parameters? Does Laravel offer any function to convert
"/id/1/name/xyz" to array('id' => 1, 'name' => 'xyz') or I need to
write custom function? Is there a better way to achieve my
requirements?

Answer 1

I believe not. Plus, in this way you won't be able to understand which values are being passed.
Even if there is one, I think you don't actually need to pass the array. IMHO, I prefer to keep the items separate, then manipulate them from the controller. This is just my personal suggestion, but if you need an array of data, why don't you use a POST method? (the only right answer, is that you want the users to be able to save the link :P )
The complicated part about your request, is that you want to keep everything under the same controller action, which messes the routes. I would try this (in your routes.php):
Route::pattern('id', '[0-9]+');
Route::pattern('name', '[a-Z]+');
Route::get('route1/{id}/{name?}/{orderby?}', 'Controller1#controllerAction1');
Route::get('route1/{name}/{orderby?}', 'Controller1#controllerAction1');
In this way:
you can have a route with just the ID, where NAME and ORDERBY are optional
if no ID is passed, you can have a route with only NAME, where ORDERBY is optional
Note how this is different from your URLs: it's much more complicated to put the routes as you wrote them id/{id}/name/{name}, than in the way I proposed {id}/{name}. If you need them exactly your way, why don't you call the links passing the variables from the GET function as follows? http://www.yoursite.com/route1?id=xxxx&name=yyyy&orderBy=zzzz

Answer 2

To have the route parameters convert from a set of individual parameters to an array that contains all the parameters in Laravel 5, you can call this from the Controller:
$routeParameters = $this->getRouter()->getCurrentRoute()->parameters()
For the route definition
Route::get('route1/id/{id}/name/{name}', 'Controller1#controllerAction1');
if a user hits the route with the following: /route1/id/2/name/john
$routeParameters would equal
array(id => 2, name => 'john')