Routes collision in Laravel 4

Question

I am working on a project using Laravel 4, I have a "user route" to show user profiles by their username:

Route::get("user/{username}", array( 'as' => 'userProfile', 'uses' => 'UserController@getProfile') );

But here I have another route which shows a user's messages.

Route::get('user/messages', array( 'as' => 'userMessages', 'uses' => 'MessageController@getMessages') )

But there is a collision here. Laravel thinks "messages" is a username because of first Route.

How can I work around this? Could some one help me, thanks.

Answer 1

You must change the order of these Routes as Laravel processes them in the order they are defined in routes.php

so,

Route::get('user/messages', array( 'as' => 'userMessages', 'uses' => 'MessageController@getMessages') )

comes before

Route::get("user/{username}", array( 'as' => 'userProfile', 'uses' => 'UserController@getProfile') );

And then in your User validation you must prevent anyone from choosing the username messages