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When creating routes for your MVC web application I have seen two possible ways to pass variables to a controller method:

With the first approach the variable is passed to a parameter of the controller method and utilized as such:

1a. http://domain.com/controller1/method1/variable1

1b. class controller1 extends main_controller(){

      function method1($var1){

         echo $var1; //prints "variable1"

      }

    }

The next approach uses URI parameters and allows for the name of the variables being passed to appear in the URL:

2a. http://domain.com/controller1/method1/variable1/34/variable2/56

2b. class controller1 extends main_controller(){

        function method1(){

            //split the uri into an array using framework function
            $uri = $this->uri_to_assoc()

            //call the uri variables as array indexes
            echo $uri['variable1']; //prints "34"

            echo $uri['variable2']; //prints "56"

        }         

    }

My question is concerning when to use one case vs the other? My guess would be that approach #2 would be more for RESTful web services while approach #1 would be for a web application that will be serving html and crawled by search engines?

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1  
If in the second method http://example.com/controller/method/var1/34/var2/56 and http://example.com/controller/method/var2/56/var1/34 access the same resource, then that breaks the URI idempotency. That can have a ignificant effect on clients. –  Bart van Ingen Schenau Jan 21 at 18:34

1 Answer 1

up vote 0 down vote

I would say it depends on your needs.

  • Do you need to know the name of the variable?
  • Do you want the (multiple) variables to be passed in a specific order?
  • Is the amount of variables going to grow (like filters)?
  • Does it need to be part of the url? (i.e. for SEO reasons)

I mostly know two variants (different then the examples you gave), and in applications I write I catch these in these ways:

1. In the url: www.youtube.com/brandname

Using a regular expression I predefine the names of the different parts in the url. And thus their position is (mostly) fixed.

/(?<id>[0-9])/(?<slug>[a-z0-9])/

Then you can pass these named or unnamed to the controller. How doesn't matter that much, as you already know which are coming in already.

function channel($id, $slug)

2. In the GET/POST request: www.google.com/?q=foo&client=bar&channel=baz&...

Just accessing the GET/POST directly.

function search() {
    if (empty($_GET['q']) || invalid($_GET['q'])) {
        // return to user
    }

    $query = $_GET['q'];
}
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