ElkArte Community

I've been working on tweaking the dispatcher to make use of the autoloader and namespaces to allow drop-n-play addons to hook actions from their isolated directories under addons/^[1].

In doing some research on how PHP frameworks handle dispatching, I came across numerous examples of routers and dispatchers ^[2]. My knowledge of routers comes from the Golang scene, where I use routers as part of the Revel framework for my clients' websites ^[3]. It seems that many have created router and dispatcher classes for PHP, which I think would be suitable to use in ElkArte.

At the moment, we have a primitive dispatcher which calls a class and method (and includes the files before my changes), based on two GET parameters: action and subaction. However, I think it would be nicer to see a richer router which could pass parameters to action controllers from anywhere in the URL.

This is, of course, not something that should be considered until 2.0. I personally really like the way that Revel handles routing, and I would suggest following suit, but I'm wondering what others' opinions are on this?

Here's an example of what I mean:

$router = new Router();

$router->add('GET', '/', '\\ElkArte\\Controllers\\BoardIndex_Controller', 'action_boardindex');
$router->add('GET', '/activate', '\\ElkArte\\Controllers\\Register_Controller', 'action_activate');
$router->add('GET', '/movetopic/:id', '\\ElkArte\\Controllers\\MoveTopic_Controller', 'action_movetopic');
$router->add('POST', '/movetopic', '\\ElkArte\\Controllers\\MoveTopic_Controller', 'action_movetopic2');

// Fallback
$router->add('GET', '/:action', '\\ElkArte\\Controllers\\:action_Controller', 'action_index');
$router->add('GET', '/:action/:sa', '\\ElkArte\\Controllers\\:action_Controller', 'action_:sa');

This would get rid of all the fallback checks we have currently in the dispatcher and smarten everything up. Any path section leading with : is a variable which is passed to the controller, or even used in the discovery of the class and method to call. Then the dispatcher just checks if it's a 'callable' and if not, defaults to /, which in this case is the board index.

By using the correct HTTP methods to detect the type of action, we could do away with all these <action>2 url forms by looking for POST requests.

Addons could then just use the following to add routes with parameters:

$router->add('GET', '/page/:id', '\\ElkArte\\Addons\\Pages\\Pages_Controller', 'action_page');

With a router setup like this, we can implement a router method for reversal, to generate URLs from actions. This would be useful for templates/themes, where links are required, making the URL scheme more flexible, and more human-friendly if required ^[4].

My examples follow the Revel router style, but any format would do. The standardisation and flexibility of a router and dispatcher is the important part. In Elkarte, it might be best to use PHP's built-in regex format.

you have broken links.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Oops, thanks! I've converted them to footnotes and reported the bug here: https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte/issues/2171

/me likes this approach

This is something I'm happy to go about attempting in a branch on my fork aiming for 1.1 or 2.0. I'm not sure how complex it will become and how many changes will need to be made, but if it's something that everyone else is happy with, I'll give it a go. Should be a more robust approach than the query strings and dispatcher we use now.

Agreed (http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=1030). (also (http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=1803.msg11354#msg11354))

Sorry for the late reply, I didn't mark it as unread by mistake and I lost it... :-[

I wouldn't be against. ;D

That phroute router looks really cool ... nice job implementing it so far :D