URI Generation

One aspect of the Zend\Expressive\Router\RouterInterface is that it provides a generateUri() method. This method accepts a route name, and optionally an associative array of substitutions to use in the generated URI (e.g., if the URI has any named placeholders).

Naming routes

By default, routes use a combination of the path and HTTP methods supported as the name:

  • If you call route() with no HTTP methods, the name is the literal path with no changes.

php $app->route('/foo', $middleware); // "foo"

  • If you call get(), post(), put(), patch(), or delete(), the name will be the literal path, followed by a caret (^), followed by the uppercase HTTP method name:

php $app->get('/foo', $middleware); // "foo^GET"

  • If you call route() and specify a list of HTTP methods accepted, the name will be the literal path, followed by a caret (^), followed by a colon (:)-separated list of the uppercase HTTP method names, in the order in which they were added.

php $app->route('/foo, $middleware', ['GET', 'POST']); // "foo^GET:POST"

Clearly, this can become difficult to remember. As such, Expressive offers the ability to specify a custom string for the route name as an additional, optional argument to any of the above:

$app->route('/foo', $middleware, 'foo'); // 'foo'
$app->get('/foo/:id', $middleware, 'foo-item'); // 'foo-item'
$app->route('/foo', $middleware, ['GET', 'POST'], 'foo-collection'); // 'foo-collection'

We recommend that if you plan on generating URIs for given routes, you provide a custom name.

Generating URIs

Once you know the name of a URI you wish to generate, you can do so from the router instance:

$uri = $router->generateUri('foo-item', ['id' => 'bar']); // "/foo/bar"

You can omit the second argument if no substitutions are necessary.

Compose the router

For this to work, you'll need to compose the router instance in any class that requires the URI generation facility. Inject the Zend\Expressive\Router\RouterInterface service in these situations.