how can i imitate Facebook urls with multiple objects? - php

Question

i'v been trying to find a way to imitate Facebook urls on my website.
Facebook url structure are the same for all object types here are some urls and their type from Facebook:
Person - https://facebook.com/personUsername/
Page - https://facebook.com/page-identifier/
App - https://facebook.com/app-identifier/
after searching their apis i noticed they have type for each object for example a person have a type of "person".
i tried to implement this without having just one table with all my objects and a type column:
i have 5 objects on my website with 5 tables.
tracks, artists, users, albums, clips
here is how i implemented it.
a user goes to https://mysite.com/track-slug/
i take the slug and query the slug on all mysql tables until i find a match. then i render the correct view.
the question: is it possible to imitate Facebook urls without having just one mysql table or doing multiple queries on each request to mysql ?

Answer 1

If your MySQL tables have the same columns, you could do a UNION of these:
SELECT * FROM
(SELECT name, col1, col2 FROM table1
UNION
SELECT name, col1, col2 FROM table2
UNION
SELECT name, col1, col2 FROM table3
) AS t
WHERE t.name = 'abc'
Example result:
+------+------+------+
| name | col1 | col2 |
+------+------+------+
| abc | 1 | 2 |
+------+------+------+
If you in addition need to know the table name for each item, you could add another column in each SELECT statement:
SELECT * FROM
(SELECT name, col1, col2, 'table1' AS 'table' FROM table1
UNION
SELECT name, col1, col2, 'table2' AS 'table' FROM table2
UNION
SELECT name, col1, col2, 'table3' AS 'table' FROM table3
) AS t
WHERE t.name = 'abc'
Example result:
+------+------+------+--------+
| name | col1 | col2 | table |
+------+------+------+--------+
| abc | 1 | 2 | table2 |
+------+------+------+--------+
Even if you have different columns in your tables, you can use this technique for the tables which are the same (e.g., name, plus the table column in ex. 2) and do a second query for the rest of the columns, instead of having to do up to one query per table.

Answer 2

here's a hint
htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
PHP:
$uri = rawurldecode(trim(parse_url(getenv('REQUEST_URI'), PHP_URL_PATH), '/'));
$params = explode('/', $uri);
$params = explode('_', $params);
$controller = array_shift($params);
$method = array_shift($params);
now go to
domain.com/track_slug
then in your index.php do
php > echo $controller
you should get track
php > echo $method
also, you will get slug
what you do with that information is up to your controller, for example. Have the Track::slug() do your database fetches and queries.
or you can do something a little more to the poing
domain.com/query/track/slug
$uri = rawurldecode(trim(parse_url(getenv('REQUEST_URI'), PHP_URL_PATH), '/'));
$params = explode('/', $uri);
$request = array_shift($params);
$controller = array_shift($params);
$method = array_shift($params);
which then your request would be query, your controller would be track, and your method would be slug.
So now you know that you want to query the track object for the slug in your databases.