CodeIgniter - Dynamic URL segments - codeigniter

Question

I was wondering if someone could help me out.
Im building a forum into my codeigniter application and im having a little trouble figuring out how i build the segments.
As per the CI userguide the uri is built as follows
www.application.com/CLASS/METHOD/ARGUMENTS
This is fine except i need to structure that part a bit different.
In my forum i have categories and posts, so to view a category the following url is used
www.application.com/forums
This is fine as its the class name, but i want to have the next segment dynamic, for instance if i have a category called 'mycategory' and a post by the name of 'this-is-my-first-post', then the structure SHOULD be
www.application.com/forums/mycategory/this-is-my-first-post
I cant seem to achieve that because as per the documentation the 'mycategory' needs to be a method, even if i was to do something like /forums/category/mycategory/this-is-my-first-post it still gets confusing.
If anyone has ever done something like this before, could they shed a little light on it for me please, im quite stuck on this.
Cheers,

Answer 1

Nothing is confusing in the document but you are a little bit confused. Let me give you some suggestions.
You create a view where you create hyperlinks to be clicked and in the hyperlink you provide this instruction
First Post
In the controller you can easily get this
$category = $this->uri->segment(3);
$post = $this->uri->segment(4);
And now you can proceed.
If you think your requirements are something else you can use a hack i have created a method for this which dynamically assign segments.
Go to system/core/uri.php and add this method
function assing_segment($n,$num)
{
$this->segments[$n] = $num;
return $this->segments[$n];
}
How to use
$this->uri->assign_segment(3,'mycategory');
$this->uri->assign_segment(4,'this-is-my-first-post');
And if you have error 'The uri you submitted has disallowed characters' then go to application/config/config.php and add - to this
$config['permitted_uri_chars'] = 'a-z 0-9~%.:_\-';

Answer 2

You could make a route that forwards to a lookup function.
For example in your routes.php add a line something like;
$route['product/(:any)/(:any)'] = "forums/cat_lookup/$1/$2";
This function would then do a database lookup to find the category.
...
public function cat_lookup($cat, $post) {
$catid = $this->forum_model->get_by_name($cat);
if ($catid == FALSE) {
redirect('/home');
}
$post_id = $this->post_model->get_by_name($post);
/* whatever else you want */
// then call the function you want or load the view
$this->load->view('show_post');
}
...
This method will keep the url looking as you want and handle any problems if the category does not exist.Don't forget you can store the category/posts in your database using underscores and use the uri_title() function to make them pretty,

Answer 3

Set in within config/routes.php
$route['song-album/(:any)/:num'] = 'Home/song_album/$id';
fetch in function with help of uri segment.
$this->uri->segment(1);