Imitating Drupal url aliases in Laravel 5.2 - php

Question

In Drupal there is a simple url rewrite system that stores path aliases and the real route in the database.
For example:
/category/hello => node/5
I would like to imitate this system in Laravel.
I know how to create the database structure. What I would like suggestions for is actually overriding and remapping the incoming request.
I've taken a glance at the router. No events are really sticking out. What I would like to avoid is adding every permutation as a static route. I would like to for this to be completely dynamic.
I was reading middleware with a redirect would work but don't know if that is the best route to go. Keep in mind that the aliases could be anything. There isn't any set pattern.
The actual business case for this is the application has a hierarchy of categories like for a catalog on an ecommerce site. For every path a dynamic page will need to exist and possibly also allow pass-thrus to other pages.
Ex.
/sports/football/nfl => \App\Http\Controllers\Category::lp(2)
Even something like:
/sports/football/nfl/:game/lines => \App\Http\Controllers\Lines::lp(:game)
However, I don't want to have every permutation in the db. Just the base one and allow everything after /sports/football/nfl/* pass thru to a completely different location.
If I do recall in Symfony this could be done with a custom route matcher. However, I don't see anything like that in Laravel. Unless I'm just missing something. It looks like you either add a static route or nothing all but I haven't taken the deep dive into that code yet so could be wrong.

Answer 1

I was able to implement a dynamic routing system by creating my own custom route and adding to the route collection manually.
Custom Route
use Illuminate\Routing\Route as BaseRoute;
use Modules\Catalog\Routing\Matching\CategoryValidator;
use Illuminate\Routing\Matching\MethodValidator;
use Illuminate\Routing\Matching\SchemeValidator;
use Illuminate\Routing\Matching\HostValidator;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Modules\Event\Repositories\CategoryRepository;
use Illuminate\Routing\ControllerDispatcher;
/**
* Special dynamic touting for catalog categories.
*/
class CategoryRoute extends BaseRoute {
protected $validatorOverrides;
/**
* #param CategoryRepository
*/
protected $categoryRepository;
/**
* Create a new Route instance.
*
* #param CategoryRepository $categoryRepository
* The category repository.
*/
public function __construct(CategoryRepository $categoryRepository)
{
$this->categoryRepository = $categoryRepository;
$action = [
'uses'=> function() use ($categoryRepository) {
$path = app('request')->path();
$category = $categoryRepository->findOneByHierarchicalPath($path);
$controller = app()->make('Modules\Catalog\Http\Controllers\Frontend\CategoryController');
return $controller->callAction('getIndex', ['categoryId'=>$category->getId()]);
}
];
$action['uses']->bindTo($this);
parent::__construct(['GET', 'HEAD', 'POST', 'PUT', 'PATCH', 'DELETE'],'_catalog_category',$action);
}
/**
* Determine if the route matches given request.
*
* #param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request
* #param bool $includingMethod
* #return bool
*/
public function matches(Request $request, $includingMethod = true)
{
$this->compileRoute();
$validators = $this->getValidatorOverrides();
foreach ($validators as $validator) {
/*if (! $includingMethod && $validator instanceof MethodValidator) {
continue;
}*/
if (! $validator->matches($this, $request)) {
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
/**
* Get the route validators for the instance.
*
* #return array
*/
public function getValidatorOverrides()
{
if (isset($this->validatorOverrides)) {
return $this->validatorOverrides;
}
$this->validatorOverrides = [
new MethodValidator, new SchemeValidator,
new HostValidator, /*new UriValidator,*/
new CategoryValidator($this->categoryRepository)
];
return $this->validatorOverrides;
}
}
Custom Route Validator
<?php
namespace Modules\Catalog\Routing\Matching;
use Illuminate\Routing\Matching\ValidatorInterface;
use Illuminate\Routing\Route;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Modules\Event\Repositories\CategoryRepository;
class CategoryValidator implements ValidatorInterface
{
protected $categoryRepository;
public function __construct(CategoryRepository $categoryRepository) {
$this->categoryRepository = $categoryRepository;
}
/**
* Validate a given rule against a route and request.
*
* #param \Illuminate\Routing\Route $route
* #param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request
* #return bool
*/
public function matches(Route $route, Request $request)
{
$path = $request->path() == '/' ? '/' : '/'.$request->path();
$category = $this->categoryRepository->findOneByHierarchicalPath($path);
return $category?true:false;
}
}
To satisfy the requirements of the category repository dependency I had to also create a subscriber that adds the route after all the providers had been booted. Simply placing it in the routes.php file would not work because there was no guarantee that all the dependencies for IoC would be configured when that file gets loaded.
Bootstrap Subscriber
use Modules\Catalog\Routing\CategoryRoute;
use Modules\Event\Repositories\CategoryRepository;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route as RouteFacade;
class BootstrapSubscriber {
public function subscribe($events) {
$events->listen(
'bootstrapped: Illuminate\Foundation\Bootstrap\BootProviders',
'Modules\Catalog\Subscribers\BootstrapSubscriber#onBootstrappedBootProviders'
);
}
public function onBootstrappedBootProviders($event) {
$categoryRepository = app(CategoryRepository::class);
RouteFacade::getRoutes()->add(new CategoryRoute($categoryRepository));
}
}
I will probably expand on this but that is the basic way to do it.