CakePHP Router: how to pass the first parameter null? - cakephp

Question

My action is defined like this:
function actionName($par1 = null, $par2 = null)
I need a special route looking like: example.com/r/ABCD which should call
SomeController->actionName(null, "ABCD")
How is it to achieve with Cake's Router::connect() ?

Answer 1

You can try reversing the params like
function actionName( $par2 = null, $par1 = null)

Answer 2

1.- arg1 optional, arg2 not optional
I would change the order of the parameters, so the first parameter is truly optional.
2.- arg1 optional, arg2 not optional, without reordering
(not the best idea, but I assumed business rules required it)
Make a wrapper function.
SomeController {
wrapperFun(arg2) {
actualFunction(null, arg2)
}
actualFun(arg1, arg2) {
// do something
}
}
Now you can have:
SomeController/wrapperFun/ABC
SomeController/actualFun/arg1/ABC
And then with the magic of routing, you can redirect actualFun/ABC to wrapperFun/ABC. So the user will only see pretty URLs.
3.- arg1 optional, arg2 optional
So you have 4 possible options, right?
somecontroller/action/arg1/arg2
somecontroller/action/arg1
somecontroller/action/arg2
somecontroller/action
I believe this is your actual question:
How do I deal with functions that have multiple optional arguments?
In this cases what you need to use are associative arrays. That is actually how CakePHP does it in many parts. It looks like this:
$arr = {"arg2" => "some val"};
// calling the function with $arr
// some_action($arr);
some_action($argArr) {
$arg1 = isset($argArr["arg1"]) ? $argArr["arg1"] : null;
$arg2 = isset($argArr["arg2"]) ? $argArr["arg2"] : null;
}
Now, about the URLs, that is for you to decide. You must have a mechanism that will tell you what value is represented by each section of the URL. What comes to mind are two options:
First, use place holders (ugly):
some_controller/some_action/arg1/non/arg3/non/arg4
Or, use wrapper actions, similar to what is seen before in my answer (ugly too).
some_controller/action5/arg5
// then in the wrapper (action5) you have:
action5(arg) {
$arr = {"arg5" => arg};
some_action($arr);
}
As you can see this can get out of hand easily. I don't know what you are actually trying to do, but it seems that you are sending data by the wrong channel.
You might want to use a POST and use an array directly, instead of building your own, check out the request object.