Dynamically generate URL in Laravel - php

Question

I am using Laravel 4 for a new project, which is a news site.
The URL for a single article should be like this:
domain.com/{category}/{shorturl}/{id}
(for example "domain.com/sports/realmadrid-barcelona/15")
In my routes.php file I have declared:
Route::get('{cat}/{shorturl}/{id}', 'ArticlesController#view');
which is working fine.
Now all I need to do is use a single Article (model) instance to pass as parameter in the Controller action to generate the URL/Route. This means, instead of passing all three parameters ('cat', 'shorturl' and 'id'), I would like to pass the Article instance.
To manage this, what I did so far is the following:
In routes.php:
Route::model('article', 'Article');
Route::get('{cat}/{shorturl}/{id}', 'ArticlesController#view');
Route::get('article/{article}', 'ArticlesController#generateUrl');
In ArticlesController.php:
public function view($cat, $urltext, $id)
{
$article = Article::findOrFail($id);
return View::make('articleView', compact(array('article')));
}
public function generateUrl(Article $article)
{
$cat = $article->category()->pluck('text');
$shorturl = $article->urltext;
$id = $article->id;
return Redirect::action('ArticlesController#view', array('cat' => $cat, 'shorturl' => $shorturl, 'id' => $id));
}
By doing this, in my view file I have something like this to produce links to other articles:
{{ $otherarticle->title }}
The problem is that, although the redirect works, the actual URL (the one shown on mouse hover) is the 'original' one (this means: "domain.com/article/123") instead of the intended ("domain.com/sports/realmadrid-barcelona/123").
Any ideas on how to accomplish this? I would like to only use $article (the Article model instance) to generate URLs, in order to keep the code as simple and clean as possible.
Thank you,
Ilias

Answer 1

Instead of using a redirect you need to generate the real url right away.
I would add this method to your model class
class Article extends Eloquent {
public function getUrl(){
$cat = $this->category()->pluck('text');
$shorturl = $this->urltext;
$id = $this->id;
return URL::action('ArticlesController#view', array('cat' => $cat, 'shorturl' => $shorturl, 'id' => $id));
}
}
And then just call it on the article object $article->getUrl() to generate the url