Laravel URL Generation Not Including Parameters - php

Question

I'm seeing an issue with Laravel 4 when I have two routes pointing to the same action, one within a group and one just "loose" in the routes.php file.
<?php
// Routes.php
Route::group(array('domain' => '{subdomain}.domain.com'), function()
{
Route::get('profile/{id}/{name}', 'ProfileController#index');
});
Route::get('profile/{id}/{name}', 'ProfileController#index');
// Template.blade.php
Jim Smith
The template links to: currentsubdomain.domain.com/profile/%7Bid%7D/%7Bname%7D instead of the expected behaviour of swapping the ID and name for 123 and JimSmith respectively.
If I comment out, the first route (the one within the group), the code works as expected. Why does adding this additional route break the URL generation? Is there a way to work around this? Am I missing something obvious?
P.s. For those wondering why I need this route in two places it's so I can optionally generate the url with the subdomain using URL::action('ProfileController#index' array('subdomain' => 'james', 'id' => 123, 'name' => 'JimSmith');

Answer 1

The problem is that you don't have names/aliases for the routes so it's defaulting to the first one it comes across.
Consider this an alternate route structure:
Route::group(array('domain' => '{subdomain}.domain.com'), function() {
Route::get('profile/{id}/{name}', [
'as' => 'tenant.profile.index',
'uses' => 'ProfileController#index'
]);
});
Route::get('profile/{id}/{name}', [
'as' => 'profile.index',
'uses' => 'ProfileController#index'
]);
Now that you have these routes named, you can do:
{{ URL::route('profile.index', [123, 'jSmith']) }}
Or alternatively:
{{ URL::route('tenant.profile.index', ['subdomain', 123, 'jSmith']) }}
As just an added extra, you could only have this route defined once, then in all the controller methods you'd have something like:
public function index($subdomain = null, $id, $name) { }
Then you can just simply pass www through as the subdomain and have some code somewhere that discounts the www.domain.com domain from certain actions.
Multi-tenancy (if that is indeed what you're after) isn't easy and straight forward but there are some methods used to tackle certain parts. I'm actually planning on writing a tutorial regarding it, but for now I hope this helps somewhat.