Zend adding parameter to URL before generating view

Question

The title might be misleading but I'm trying to do something very simple but cant figure it out.

Lets say I have a Question controller and show action and question id is the primary key with which I look up question details - so the URL looks like this

http://www.example.com/question/show/question_id/101

This works fine - So when the view is generated - the URL appears as shown above.

Now in the show action, what I want to do is, append the question title (which i get from database) to the URL - so when the view is generated - the URL shows up as

http://www.example.com/question/show/question_id/101/how-to-make-muffins

Its like on Stack overflow - if you take any question page - say

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5451200/

and hit enter The question title gets appended to the url as

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5451200/make-seo-sensitive-url-avoid-id-zend-framework

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

You will have to add a custom route to your router, unless you can live with an url like:

www.example.com/question/show/question_id/101/{paramName}/how-to-make-muffins

You also, if you want to ensure that this parameter is always showing up, need to check if the parameter is set in the controller and issue a redirect if it is missing.

So, in your bootstrap file:

class Bootstrap extends Zend_Application_Bootstrap_Bootstrap
{
  public function _initRoutes ()
  {
    // Ensure that the FrontController has been bootstrapped:
    $this->bootstrap('FrontController');
    $fc = $this->getResource('FrontController');
    /* @var $router Zend_Controller_Router_Rewrite */
    $router = $fc->getRouter();

    $router->addRoutes( array ( 
      'question' => new Zend_Controller_Router_Route (
        /* :controller and :action are special parameters, and corresponds to
         * the controller and action that will be executed.
         * We also say that we should have two additional parameters:
         * :question_id and :title. Finally, we say that anything else in
         * the url should be mapped by the standard {name}/{value}
         */
        ':controller/:action/:question_id/:title/*',
        // This argument provides the default values for the route. We want
        // to allow empty titles, so we set the default value to an empty
        // string
        array (
           'controller' => 'question',
           'action' => 'show',
           'title' => ''
        ),
        // This arguments contains the contraints for the route parameters.
        // In this case, we say that question_id must consist of 1 or more
        // digits and nothing else.
        array (
           'question_id' => '\d+'
        )
      )
    ));
  }
}

Now that you have this route, you can use it in your views like so:

<?php echo $this->url(
         array(
            'question_id' => $this->question['id'], 
            'title' => $this->question['title']
         ),
         'question'
      );
      // Will output something like: /question/show/123/my-question-title 
?>

In your controller, you need to ensure that the title-parameter is set, or redirect to itself with the title set if not:

public function showAction ()
{
  $question = $this->getQuestion($this->_getParam('question_id'));
  if(!$this->_getParam('title', false)) {
     $this->_helper->Redirector
        ->setCode(301) // Tell the client that this resource is permanently 
                       // residing under the full URL
        ->gotoRouteAndExit(
           array(
             'question_id' => $question['id'],
             'title' => $question['title']
           )
        );
  }
  [... Rest of your code ...]
}

Answer 2

This is done using a 301 redirect.

Fetch the question, filter out and/or replace URL-illegal characters, then construct the new URL. Pass it to the Redirector helper (in your controller: $this->_redirect($newURL);)