Routing in CakePHP to vanity urls - php

Question

I was wondering if there was an easy and best practices way to make routes in CakePHP (routes.php file) to map userIDs to a vanity url?
I have (terrible way to do this) the following test code in my routes page:
$users = array
(
1 => 'firstname-lastname',
2 => 'firstname2-lastname2'
);
//profiles
foreach($users as $k => $v)
{
// LESSONS (Profiles)
Router::connect('/:user', array('controller' => 'teachers', 'action' => 'contentProfile', $k),
array('user' => '(?i:'.$v.')'));
}
The above code routes my teachers controller with conProfile as the action from:
mydomain.com/teachers/contentProfile/1
to
mydomain.com/firstname-lastname
Can I connect to the db from the routing page? Is that not a good idea in terms of performance? Let me know what's the best way to do this.

Answer 1

You can create a custom route class that will look up passed urls in the database and translate them to the correct user id. Setting a long cache time should mitigate any performance impact of hitting the DB.
The book documentation is a little thin, however, but the basic structure is this:
class TeachersRoute extends CakeRoute {
/**
* Modify incoming parameters so that controller receives the correct data
*/
function parse($url) {
$params = parent::parse($url);
// Add / modify parameter information
// The teacher id should be sent as the first value in the $params['pass'] array
return $params;
// Or return false if lookup failed
}
/**
* Modify parameters so calls like HtmlHelper::url() output the correct value
*/
function match($url) {
// modify parameters
// add $url['slug'] if only id provided
return parent::match($url);
}
And then in your routes:
Router::connect(
'/:slug',
array(
'controller' => 'teachers',
'action' => 'contentProfile'
),
array(
'slug' => '[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+'
'routeClass' => 'TeachersRoute',
)
);