Parametric routes

A SEO-friendly URL can contain valuable information.

A route itself (not URL query parameters like described here) can contain valuable information.

For example a route contacts/1234 means that we want to show the details of the contact with ID = 1234.

NOTE: A non-SEO-friendly URL could look similar to contacts?idContact=1234. Accessing such URL query parameters is described here.

Defining route variables in the route pattern

If you want to use SEO-friendly URLs and extract variables from such URLs, you must use regular expressions within definition of the routes.

The simplest example is following:

Hubleto/App/Custom/Addressbook/Loader.php

class Loader {
  public function init(): void {
    $this->router()->get([
      '/^contact\/(\d+)?\/?$/' => Controllers\ContactDetail::class,
    ])
  }
}

In this example, the route is /^contact\/(\d+)?\/?$/. Reading the regular expression, this route will match URLs like contact/1234, contact/5678 or similar. The (\d+) is the first variable, counting from zero, so the index of this variable is '0' (integer zero).

In this case, if you use $this->router()->routeVarAsInteger(0) in your controller, you will get the value of this route variable.

But, you also can have named variables.

Named variables

The only difference in named variables is that they are accessible by some name - a string. For example, we will name the variable idContact and so we want to get its value by calling $this->router()->routeVarAsInteger('idContact').

To get this, the route pattern must be following:

$this->router()->get([
  '/^contact\/(<idContact>\d+)?\/?$/' => Controllers\ContactDetail::class,
])

See the <idContact> inside the route pattern. This is a standard regular expression syntax, just search for regular expression named variables if you want to learn more.

routeVarAs...()

As already shown before, to get the value of the idContact parameter in your controller, you should use the method called routeVarAs...() method which is accessible via the router. This is very similar to accessing URL query parameters encoded in the GET request.

The syntax for named variables is following:

$idContact = $this->router()->routeVarAsInteger('idContact');

and for variables indexed by numbers:

$idContact = $this->router()->routeVarAsInteger(0);

This method takes a name of the parameter as the argument and returns its sanitized value.

There are also similar methods avaialable:

Method	Description
`routeVarAsString(string\|int $varIndex): string`	Fetch the URL parameter as string.
`routeVarAsInteger(string\|int $varIndex): int`	Fetch the URL parameter as integer.
`routeVarAsFloat(string\|int $varIndex): float`	Fetch the URL parameter as float.
`routeVarAsBool(string\|int $varIndex): bool`	Fetch the URL parameter as bool.
`routeVarAsArray(string\|int $varIndex): array`	Fetch the URL parameter as array.

Table: List of methods to get values of route variables

Full list of these methods is in RouterInterface.php.

Real example

Example implementation of the ContactDetail controller which takes the idContact parameter from the URL is following:

Hubleto/App/Custom/Addressbook/Controllers/ContactDetail.php

namespace Hubleto\App\Custom\Addressbook\Controllers;
class ContactDetail extends \Hubleto\Erp\Controller {
  public function prepareView(): void {
    $idContact = $this->router()->routeVarAsInteger('idContact');
    // Load your contact with ID = $idContact
    $this->setView('@Hubleto:App:Custom:Addressbook:ContactDetail.twig');
  }
}