CakePHP 1.3: Use Route to get the following URL format /news/06/27/12/slug-slug-slug - cakephp

Question

All,
I currently have slug setup in my app where I generate the following as links:
http://www.domain.com/article/my-first-news-article.
And this is the current route that I use to accomplish that in addition to the view acepting a slug instead of id:
Router::connect('/article/*',array('controller' => 'articles', 'action' => 'view'));
However, I wanted to improve that a little bit more by adding published date to the URL like the following:
http://www.domain.com/article/2012/06/27/my-first-news-article
I have the following code from the CakePHP manual, but it doesnt seem to work:
Router::connect(
'/article/:year/:month/:day/:slug',
array(
'controller' => 'articles',
'action' => 'view'
),
array(
'year' => '[12][0-9]{3}',
'month' => '0[1-9]|1[012]',
'day' => '0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01]'
)
);
For the sake of this, I really dont care what date is passed to the view. I just care about the slug that is passed. Then I will use function view($slug) to find the article and display it. However the URL needs to be http://www.domain.com/2012/06/27/slug-slug-slug
Thank you....

Answer 1

How do the $this->Html->link() calls look like in the places where you want to use the date in the link?
Are you adding the required params there?
$this->Html->link('Article', array('year' => 2012, 'month' => 01, 'day' => 01, 'action' => 'view', 'slug' => $article['Article']['slug']));

Answer 2

For the sake of completeness, and because somebody else might be interested in this as well, I'll show you my solution to a similar problem:
I want to have URLS in the format
http://mydomain.com/blog/2012/06/slug-slug-slug
i.e. /blog/yyyy/mm/slug
For this, I use
// view a post by year and month and title
Router::connect('/blog/:year/:month/:title/*', array(
'controller' => 'posts',
'action' => 'view'
), array(
'year' => '[12][0-9]{3}',
'month' => '0[1-9]|1[012]',
'title' => '[a-z0-9-]+'
));
With the rules below, you can make sure the correct formats are entered. It also prevents users from entering values such as &"% as slugs.
The /* after title even allows for additional parameters, e.g. for pagination, when your blog entry has several pages (http://mydomain.com/blog/2012/06/slug/page:2).
I also realized that setting the "pass" array is not really necessary (at least in CakePHP 2.0). You can access the parameters directly via $this -> request -> params['year'], etc.

Answer 3

After more research and trials I was able to figure it out.
The following route will work to accept a URL like this:
http://www.mydomain.com/article/2009/06/10/my-first-article-in-mydomain-dot-com.
As a matter of fact, it doesnt actually matter how the date is setup and it will still work. It could also be,
http://www.mydomain.com/article/06/10/2012/my-first-article-in-mydomain-dot-com
Router::connect(
'/article/:year/:month/:day/:slug',
array(
'controller' => 'articles',
'action' => 'view'
),
array(
'pass' => array('slug')
)
);