Routes play an essential role in your request/response-cycle and therefore should also be tested like any other component that you develop. As the Lithium routing infrastructure also consists of classes and methods, we can run unit and integration tests against them.

Some of the tests include checking for basic request to controller mapping, testing with an ID in the request, using the export() method and testing various routing to ensure that the output is correct (the integration tests).

In this article series we'll take an in-depth look at the Lithium router. This first part bootstraps your knowledge and lays a foundation for more advanced topics.

He introduces the Router component as having two purposes - matching a URL against the code to handle the request and the other is the reverse, creating URLs out of routes. He links to two pages where you can find more details on its API. He moves on to the request and response cycle the Router goes through each time a page is requested and walks you through some code to help it all make sense. There's also a bit at the end about creating URLs with the reverse routing methods.

Here's the good news: Zf_Controller doesn't have a Router. It uses a very simple mapping to determine the name of the controller and action.

He gives an example of the "non-routing" and how to work with the input variables for the controller instance - defining default values and setting requirements for them (as defined by matching a regular expression).

You can read more about the first part of the series here.

A big advantage to using the front controller in the Zend Framework is the ability to create nicely formatted urls. [...] The implementation of the default router in the Zend Framework (Zend_Controller_Router_Rewrite) does not allow for passing arrays in this manner though, since previously set keys get overwritten if they are declared more than once. This is somewhere between semi-annoying to very annoying, so lets get straight to hacking it into submission.

His patch only changes one line in the Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Module component - changing it from assigning to a conditional checking for the existence of an array and setting it appropriately.

Some of our Zend Framework applications have to run on IIS without ISAPI_Rewrite installed. In these cases we need urls of the form http://www.example.com/index.php?module=mod&controller=con&action=act. I couldn't get this to work out of the box with Zend Framework 1.5, so wrote my own router called App_Controller_Router_Route_RequestVars.

Most of the post is the code for the router (ready for you to cut and paste) but he's also included a usage example of it so you can easily update your bootstrap file to use it.

One of the new features to hit the Zend Framework since 0.7 is Zend_Controller_ModuleRouter and its sibling Zend_Controller_ModuleRewriteRouter. This allows for separating out sets of controlers, models and views into their own modules.

He gives both a directory structure and PHP code example of it in action, both in how it normally functions (looks for a controller with the same name as the request) and an example of how he thinks it should work - complete with code and a directory structure to compare to the previous example.

The experience has been incredibly rewarding, however, and I've had the chance to pick the brains of and work with some top-notch developers in the process. In the next week or so, we'll be releasing version 0.6.0 of the framework, and it will include much of my work in the MVC components as part of the core distribution.

Some of the changes he lists include:

• changes that promote greater flexibility and testing
• controller classes are now unit tested
• the introduction of the request and response objects
• a router is no longer needed
• the ability to push parameters into the front controller

I am using a subfolder of web root to play with the ZF and was having troubles getting my controller to go to the correct place. After considering hacking both the Apache doc root and the actual Zend_Controller_Router code and writing a patch, I stumbled on the answer - Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter.

She includes the quick code that acts as a patch for the framework, letting it know that the directory it should be rewriting to isn't the root of the domain.

This question I had heard many times and now I have a few minutes to write down the answer so that everybody who stuck in the similar trouble could quickly resolve the issue. Who works with Zend Framework, most likely, have read the "Zend_Controller / Getting Started" Zend Framework manual article, which explains how to use Zend_Controller in the root folder of the web server. But it does not answer on the "How to run my Zend Framework application in a subfolder of the web server document folder?" question and I propose you my solutions.

First is rather a hack then a recommended solution, but with it you can start the applications and examples that use standard router. The second is neater but it depends on the Zend_Controller_RewriteRouter class.

The first method makes some changes to the default routing code itself (the hack) to make it no longer just use the REQUEST_URI, but to look at more of the URL to see if subdirectories exist. OF course, the more preferred way to go, and just as simple of an option, is using the framework itself to change the RewriteRouter options to allow for the subdirectory.

I started discovering of Zend Framework and was confronted with a problem. When I've placed my test sample into site's subdirectory (http://localhost/test/), default router tried to find TestController which is not exists of course and routed me to IndexController/noRoute. It's not good for me. I decided to create my own router.

He gives the code he created to make the routing system work, using the Zend_Controller_Router_Interface and Zend_Controller_Front packages to handle the incoming requests. ]]> Wed, 08 Mar 2006 07:36:39 -0600