CodeIgniter - hidden controller - php

Question

I'm building a CMS based on CodeIgniter. It stores "views" and its data in a database and gathers the proper one when needed.
As you might have guessed - I can't generate a physical controller and matching view for each pages.
I've figured that routes would come in quite handy, since I'd prefer not to have to use a controller that's visible in the URL. Poorly explained: I'm looking for a way to reassign all requests that doesn't end up on a physically existing controller to a custom one - without it appearing in the URL. This controller would, of course, handle 404-errors and such.
Bad: .com/handler/actual-view/) Good: (.com/actual-view/) (no actual-view controller exists, or it'd be shown instead)
I've added a 404_override route which points to handler/. Now, I'm only looking for a way to find out the requested view (i.e in .com/actual-view actual-view is what I'm looking for).
I've tried
$route['404_override/(:any)'] = 'handler/$1';
and similar, which will remove the 404-override completely.

Answer 1

You would be better of extending the base Router or Controller.
By doing so you allow your application to be flexible and still conform to how CI works.

Answer 2

you need to define all of your valid routes in your route.php config file, and then at the last line,
$routes["(:any)"] = "specific controller path";
if I should give an example:
$route['u/(:any)/account'] = "user_profile/account/$1";
$route['u/(:any)/settings'] = "user_profile/settings/$1";
$route['u/(:any)/messages'] = "user_profile/messages/$1";
$route['u/(:any)'] = "user_profile/index/$1";
as seen here, I'm diverting all the urls to user profile, after the first three one couldn't catch it.

Answer 3

My solution, after some guidance from CodeIgniters awesome forum and StackOverflow's lovely members, became to route all 404 errors to my custom controller where I ensure that it's a real 404 (no views OR controllers). Later in the controller, I gather the rest of the info I need from my database URI string:
//Route
$route['404_override'] = 'start/handler';
//Controller
function handler($path = false) {
//Gather the URI from the URL-helper
$uri_string = uri_string();
//Ensure we only get the desired view and not its arguments
if(stripos($uri_string, "/") !== false) {
//Split and gather the first piece
$pieces = explode("/", $uri_string);
$desired_view = $pieces[0];
} else {
$desired_view = $uri_string;
}
//Check if there's any view under this alias
if($this->site->is_custom_view($desired_view)) {
//There is: ensure that the view has something to show
if(!$this->site->view_has_data($desired_view)) {
//No data to show, throw an error message
show_custom_error('no_view_data');
} else {
//Found the views data: show it
}
} else {
//No view to show, lets go with 404
show_custom_404();
}
}