Routes

LightVC has extremely powerful routing options and the ability to take customized routers. LightVC comes with Lvc_GetRouter, Lvc_RewriteRouter, and Lvc_RegexRewriteRouter.

If mod_rewrite is available, the regex rewrite router is likely to be all that's needed.

The webroot/index.php file might contain:

$fc = new Lvc_FrontController();
$fc->addRouter(new Lvc_RegexRewriteRouter($regexRoutes));
$fc->processRequest(new Lvc_HttpRequest());

All that's missing is the contents of $regexRoutes. Here are the routes the LightVC website uses:

<?php

// Format of regex => parseInfo
$regexRoutes = array(

    // Map nothing to the home page.
    '#^$#' => array(
        'controller' => 'page',
        'action' => 'view',
        'action_params' => array(
            'page_name' => 'home',
        ),
    ),

    // Allow direct access to all pages via a "/page/page_name" URL.
    '#^page/(.*)$#' => array(
        'controller' => 'page',
        'action' => 'view',
        'action_params' => array(
            'page_name' => 1,
        ),
    ),

    // Allow direct access to all docs via a "/docs/doc_name" URL.
    '#^docs/(.*)$#' => array(
        'controller' => 'docs',
        'action' => 'view',
        'action_params' => array(
            'doc_name' => 1,
        ),
    ),

    // Map controler/action/params
    '#^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?(.*)$#' => array(
        'controller' => 1,
        'action' => 2,
        'additional_params' => 3,
    ),

    // Map controllers to a default action (not needed if you use the
    // Lvc_Config static setters for default controller name, action
    // name, and action params.)
    '#^([^/]+)/?$#' => array(
        'controller' => 1,
        'action' => 'index',
    ),

);

?>

As of version 1.0.4, the Lvc_RegexRewriteRouter allows a redirect parameter instead of the controller/action parameters. This allows a route to redirect to another page instead of loading up a controller/action.

Static Examples:

'#^test/?$#' => array(
    'redirect' => '/some/other/page/'
),
'#^test2/?$#' => array(
    'redirect' => 'http://lightvc.org/'
),

Dynamic Example:

'#^test/([^/]*)/?$#' => array(
    'redirect' => '/faq/$1'
),

Basically, the value of the redirect option is used as the replacement variable for PHP's preg_replace function. That is how the dynamic example works.

The above examples should be enough to explain how to add routes for the Lvc_RegexRewriteRouter, but to be clear:

When specifying the parse info, use a string to use a specific value, or an integer to use the value from the regex match.
controller specifies the controller name to use.
action specifies the action name to invoke.
action_params specifies an array of parameter names and values to use.
- Parameter names do not have to be included; They are only useful if Lvc_Config::setSendActionParamsAsArray(true); is used.
additional_params should be an integer specifying which regex match to use for parsing additional parameters out of the URL.
Instead of any of the above, redirect can be specified to have the browser redirected to another page.

Those unfamiliar with regex might want to look at the pattern syntax.