felixkiss/slug-routes

This package is abandoned and no longer maintained. No replacement package was suggested.

Laravel 4: Slug-aware Route Model Binding

dev-master 2013-08-30 09:27 UTC

Requires

• php: >=5.3.0
• illuminate/support: 4.0.x

MIT

• Felix Kiss

• slug
• laravel

README

If you are using the Route Model Binding feature in Laravel 4, slug-routes gives you the ability to use some unique piece of data to represent your records in URLs other than the ID. This can help optimising your URLs for search engines, and generally give your users a better chance to grasp the functionality of your web application.

Installation

Install the package

Install the package through Composer.

In your composer.json file:

{
    "require": {
        "laravel/framework": "4.0.*",
        "felixkiss/slug-routes": "dev-master"
    }
}

Run composer update to install the package.

Configure Laravel

Add the following to your providers array in config/app.php:

'providers' => array(
    // ...

    'Felixkiss\SlugRoutes\SlugRoutesServiceProvider',
),

Usage

In the following examples, I use Closure callback routes only. I use Controller Routing all the time in my actual apps, but Closures just keep it simple and clean and I think thats more suitable just to showcase the functionality of this package.

Route Model Binding

Route Model Binding is a really cool feature of Laravel. It gives you the ability to specify a special parameter type for your routes to inject model instances into your Routes. For example, instead of doing the standard thing of

// Access via http://example.com/users/1
Route::get('users/{id}', function($id)
{
    $user = User::find($id);

    if(is_null($user))
        App::abort(404);

    return View::make('users.show', compact('user'));
});

you can define a route parameter {user} that takes an id and does the fetching of the record for you. It will even raise an 404, if no user with the existing id exists:

// Access via http://example.com/users/1
Route::model('user', 'User');
Route::get('users/{user}', function(User $user)
{
    return View::make('users.show', compact('user'));
});

This removes a lot of boilerplate code, since you can reuse this {user} in as many of your routes as you want.

The Problem

This is really convenient, but what if you want to have SEO/user-friendly URLs like /users/taylor-otwell instead of /users/1? Basically, you have three options:

Option 1 - Plain Old Route

Route::get('users/{slug}', function($slug)
{
    $user = User::where('slug', $slug);

    if(is_null($user))
        App::abort(404);

    return View::make('users.show', compact('user'));
});

This is fine, but we wanted to get rid of the boilerplate. That was the reason we started to use Route::model() in the first place.

Option 2 - Route::bind()

Route::bind('user', function($value, $route)
{
    return User::where('slug', $value)->first();
});

The docs mention this as the way to go, if we want custom URL to model matching. It works fine but I think the routes.php file is not always the right place to define this kind of thing.

Option 3 - Use slug-routes

This package provides SluggableInterface, which you can implement in your Model class. If you do, Route::model('user', 'User') will recognize it and bind to the database column returned by getSlugIdentifier() automatically. If you don't implement the interface it simply falls back to the default behavior provided by Route::model().

Example

Model:

<?php

use Felixkiss\SlugRoutes\SluggableInterface;

class User extends Eloquent implements SluggableInterface
{
    // ...

    /**
     * Use 'slug' db column as the identifier in URLs for this model.
     * Should be URL friendly and unique to avoid collisions.
     *
     * @return string
     */
    public function getSlugIdentifier()
    {
        return 'slug';
    }
}

routes.php:

// Bind {user} to User model
// If model implements SluggableInterface, it will try to match
// the value to the column specified by getSlugIdentifier()
// If model doesn't implement SluggableInterface, it will fallback
// to the default behaviour of using id.
Route::model('user', 'User');

Route::get('users/{user}', array('as' => 'users.show', function()
{
    return View::make('users.show', compact('user'));
}));

A full example, including a User model with slug, UsersController, Views, can be found on github.

License

slug-routes is open source software, licensed under the MIT License.