Two controller/actions, same URL

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
1

Hi there,

I’ve been having this problem serveral times, so now I’ve decided to make a workaround, but before I do so, and post a workaround, I would like to hear you opinion. There might be some way to do this.

Because I base a lot of my business on SEO, I often have to have two different controller actions with the same url. A real life example is a webshop with products and possibility to tag products. For each tag there is a page describing the tag and links to products in it. A tag’s url rule should be “’/<slug>’ => ‘tag/show’” and a product’s url should be “’/<slug>’ => ‘product/show’”. The problem is clear; I cant have both.

The temporary fix is something like:


'/<ProductSlug>' => 'product/show'

'/<tagSlug>' => 'tag/show'

And then in "product/show" forward to "tag/show" if no product was found for that url.

Have you ever had this problem? How did you solve it?

2

It’s possible to define custom UrlRule classes in the upcoming 1.1.8 version. It should solve your problem, you may already play around with it by getting the latest dev-version from the svn trunk.

You can read the docs for that feature here.

3

Looks really nice.

But still, I would have to create a special rule each time, and if I decide to change the rules, it’s not enough to correct in the config, I would have to rewrite the class also.

I’ve been thinking of a solution going along the lines of:

Try the first match, if the pages returns 404, try the next match. But I’m not sure how…

4

Maybe I could write a "depends" url rule class which takes an array of rules and a respective piece of php code (like bizRule in RBAC). This PHP code could be evaled and if true, use the respective URL… Might that be a solution?