Zend Framework Routing with XML

If you use Zend Framework you probably used the initRoutes() function in your Initializer.php to create nice URI’s and creating some different routing in your application. To create a customized route for your application you can use the Zend_Controller_Router_Route class from the Zend Framework.

Example code

$route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route('/your-uri/',array(
	'module' => 'default',
	'controller' => 'index',
	'action' => 'index',
));
Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()->getRouter()->addRoute('/your-uri/',$route);

If you use this the syntax like above you have to do this for all routes in your application. This makes it not maintainable for programmers. To fix this problem we are going to use a XML file with all routing information.

Example routing XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<nav>
  <item name="Home" url="/" isrouter="true" display="true" 
    controller="index" action="index">
    <subitems>
      <item name="News" url="/news/" isrouter="true" display="true" 
        controller="news" action="index">
        <subitems>
          <item name="Category 1" url="/news/category-1/" isrouter="false" 
            display="true" controller="news" action="category" />
          <item name="Category 2" url="/news/category-3/" isrouter="false" 
            display="true" controller="news" action="category" />
          <item name="Category 3" url="/news/category-3/" isrouter="false" 
            display="true" controller="news" action="category" />
          <item name="Category Routing" url="/news/:category/" isrouter="true" 
            display="false" controller="news" action="category" />
        </subitems>
      </item>
      <item name="Sport" url="/sport/" isrouter="true" display="true" 
        controller="sport" action="index">
        <subitems>
          <item name="Category 1" url="/sport/category-1/" isrouter="false" 
            display="true" controller="sport" action="category" />
          <item name="Category 2" url="/sport/category-2/" isrouter="false" 
            display="true" controller="sport" action="category" />
          <item name="Category 3" url="/sport/category-3/" isrouter="false" 
            display="true" controller="sport" action="category" />
          <item name="Category Routing" url="/sport/:category/" isrouter="true"   
            display="false" controller="sport" action="category" />
        </subitems>
      </item>
    </subitems>
  </item>
</nav>

The XML file is used for the creation of our menu (i’ll describe that in another post) and the routing information. Each item has an attribute “iscontroller” that identifies the routes to create for the application. I created a class Menu_Routing in my library to read the XML file and create the routes.

Menu_Routing.php

<?php
class Menu_Routing {
   protected static $_instance = null;
   
   public static function getInstance() {
      if (is_null(self::$_instance)) {
         self::$_instance = new self();
      }
      return self::$_instance;
   }

   public static function getRoutes() {
      $xml = simplexml_load_file(C_APPMAP .'data/nav.xml');
      $routes = self::readRoutes($xml);
        return $routes;
   }
   
   private static function readRoutes($xml) {
      $routes = array();
      foreach ($xml->item as $item) {
         if (trim($item['isrouter'])=='true') {
            if (!isset($item['module'])) $item['module'] = 'default';
            $routes[] = array(
               'url' => trim($item['url']),
               'name' => trim($item['name']),
               'controller' => trim($item['controller']),
               'action' => trim($item['action']),
               'module' => trim($item['module']),
            );
         }
         if (isset($item->subitems)) {
            $subRoutes = self::readRoutes($item->subitems);
            $routes = array_merge($routes,$subRoutes);
         }
      }
      return $routes;
   }
}

The function readRoutes returns the routes that has to be created in our Initializer.php (in the function initRoutes()), it just returns an array.

Initializer.php

public function initRoutes() {
   $routing = Menu_Routing::getInstance();
   $routes = $routing->getRoutes();
   
   foreach ($routes as $routeItem) {
      $route = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route($routeItem['url'],array(
         'module' => $routeItem['module'],
         'controller' => $routeItem['controller'],
         'action' => $routeItem['action'],
      ));
      Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()->getRouter()->addRoute($routeItem['url'],$route);
   }
}

Download source
You can download the source of this example here.