Catch a dynamic URL from controller in Symfony 4 - php

Question

I'm using Symfony 4 and the way to capture a route and direct it to a method of a controller is as follows:
/**
* #Route("/my/route", name="name_of_route")
*/
public function myMethod() {
/* some logic that render a view */
}
Within my application, I have a shopping cart. Let's suppose a hypothetical example where I have the following nesting of categories:
Solid
└>sand
└>refined sand
└>gross sand
...etc...
if the user click on refined sand, I want to generate the follow URL:
www.myWeb.com/solid/sand/refined-sand
The problem is, how do I capture this URL with annotations since it is dynamic? That is, I can not do the following:
/**
* #Route("/{category}/{subcategory}/{product}", name="name_of_route")
*/
public function myMethod() {
/* some logic that render a view */
}
Because I do not know how many nesting levels the category has.
I hope my question was understood.

Answer 1

I would suggest creating a catch all route, such as:
public function catchAllAction($url)
{
// ...
}
You can then split the $url into segments on the / character, and match the categories against your entities as required.
$categories = explode('/', $url);
As you're using annotations for your routes, you would need to make sure this was the last route registered in your application to prevent it from mistakenly matching other routes. You can do this in the routing.yml config file.
app:
resource: '#AppBundle/Controller/'
type: annotation
catch_all:
path: /{url}
defaults: { _controller: AppBundle:Category:catchAll }
methods: [ GET ]
requirements:
url: '.+'
If possible, I would also suggest prefixing the route to limit the route patterns it might match. E.g. /categories/{url}