[TYPO3-50-general] Routing and SubPackages

[Bastian Waidelich]

Hi there,

We've (had?) a problem with ambiguity of Routes when generating URIs 
using the uriHelper/linkHelper of FLOW3:

Imagine the following two simple Routes:

Costumers_Route:
   uriPattern: 'customers/[@action]'
   controllerObjectNamePattern: 
'F3\@package\Frontend\Controller\@controllerController'
   defaults:
     @package:    MyPackage1
     @controller: Default

CostumersAdministration_Route:
   uriPattern: 'customers/admin/[@action]'
   controllerObjectNamePattern: 
'F3\@package\Administration\Controller\@controllerController'
   defaults:
     @package:    MyPackage1
     @controller: Default


Now, when using FLOW3s URIHelper to generate a proper link:
$uriHelper->URIFor('list', array(), 'Default');
FLOW3 can't explicitly resolve the matching Route because both Routes 
would match. In this case, the resulting URI would always be 
'customers/admin/list' because the last Route has the highest priority*.

Our first idea was to check whether a specific controller and action 
exists.. But that would lead to a lot of dependencies. Furthermore the 
same action could exist in two correspondent Controllers obviously.

Other frameworks solve this by allowing to specify the Route name when 
generating the URIs (namely e.g. Zend Framework does so). But IMO this 
is a smelly solution as it leads to unwanted dependencies too.

We think, this problem occurs only when calling Controllers of 
SubPackages, so the solution Sebastian and me came up with this morning 
was, to include @subpackage to the Route definition. The example from 
above would look like this then:


Costumers_Route:
   uriPattern: 'customers/[@action]'
   controllerObjectNamePattern: 
'F3\@package\Frontend\Controller\@controllerController'
   defaults:
     @package:    MyPackage1
     @subpackage: Frontend
     @controller: Default

CostumersAdministration_Route:
   uriPattern: 'customers/admin/[@action]'
   controllerObjectNamePattern: 
'F3\@package\Administration\Controller\@controllerController'
   defaults:
     @package:    MyPackage1
     @subpackage: Administration
     @controller: Default

$uriHelper->URIFor('list', array(), 'Default', 'Frontend');

see?

The good news:
"controllerObjectNamePattern" & "viewObjectNamePattern" wouldn't be 
needed anymore if we'd agree on a standard naming like:

Classes
   SubPackage1
     Controller
     View
   SubPackage2
     Controller
     View

(in the current distributions this is the case already IIRC)


Currently \F3\FLOW3\MVC\Request resolves the fully qualified 
controller/view name which isn't really the job of a request object.
Instead of the methods setControllerObjectNamePattern() and 
setViewObjectNamePattern() we could have 
setFullyQualifiedControllerName() or something like this.
The full view name does not have to be specified if it is consistent 
with the defaults (otherwise it could be overwritten by the controller, 
right?).

We could still use controllerObjectNamePattern in the Routes to allow 
exceptions (should we?). But IMHO the Router should resolve the full 
name, not the request object.


Any objections, ideas, excitation, bashing?

Bastian


--
* Currently Routes are processed in _descending_ order as I thought you 
would add more specific Routes to the end of Routes.yaml by default.. 
But this seems to be confusing to some users and we might change the 
behavior so that the _first_ Route has the highest priority. What do you 
think?