Routes¶

First thing we need to do, is define some routes. SlaxWeb Framework does not automatically route any requests to any of your controllers based on some URL parameters, which means we will have to define 4 routes for 4 of our pages, including one more route for saving the newly created and/or edited news article.

You can find more details regarding the routing in the Routing and URLs documentation.

Route collection file¶

First we are going to create a Route collection file, by default located in app/Routes. The Route collection file must define a class in the \App\Routes namespace, which can of course be changed, as long as it remains autoloaded by the Autoloader. For more information about changing the namespace and/or the location please refer to Changing Namespace Autoloading Settings section of the documentation.

We will assume that you did not change the location of the file, nor the namespace, if you did, please alter the namespace in the examples bellow before using them.

We are going to create a file named NewsCollection.php in app/Routes directory with the following contents:

<?php
namespace App\Routes;

use SlaxWeb\Router\Route;
use SlaxWeb\Router\Request;
use SlaxWeb\Router\Response;
use SlaxWeb\Bootstrap\Application;

class NewsCollection extends \SlaxWeb\Router\Service\RouteCollection
{
    public function define()
    {
    }
}

Right now the Route Collection does not define any routes, as we have defined only the class with the define method. Since the define method is defined abstract in the \SlaxWeb\Router\Service\RouteCollection class, our Route Collection class has to define it. We will use this method to define our new routes.

Load the collection file¶

Even when the Route classes are autoloaded, we still need to instruct the framework that it needs to instantiate the class and parse our defined routes. To do this, we will add the full name of the class into the configuration file app/Config/provider.php:

// ...
$configuration["routesList"] = [
    \App\Routes\NewsCollection::class
];
// ...

Adding a route¶

A route definition is essentially an array which holds the following 3 informations:

URI
HTTP Method
Action

Where the URI can be a RegExp, the HTTP Method can be one of the following:

SlaxWebRouterRoute::METHOD_GET - HTTP GET - default
SlaxWebRouterRoute::METHOD_POST - HTTP POST
SlaxWebRouterRoute::METHOD_PUT - HTTP PUT
SlaxWebRouterRoute::METHOD_DELETE - HTTP DELETE
SlaxWebRouterRoute::METHOD_CLI - Command Line Interface request
SlaxWebRouterRoute::METHOD_ANY - any one option from above

And the Action has to be a callable.

This array has to be added to the $routes class property as an array item. Since the Route Collection parent class automatically executes the define method we put our route definitions into the body of the define method:

public function define()
{
    $this->routes[] = [
        "uri"       =>  "",
        "method"    =>  Route::METHOD_GET,
        "action"    =>  function (
            Request $request,
            Response $response,
            Application $app
        ) {
            // body
        }
    ];
}

And we have defined a root route. It does nothing right now, since its body is completely empty. This route will get executed when a visitor reaches the root page of our new website.