Routing

Routing is a way to map URLs to a controller action. By defining a route, you can separate how the application is implemented from how its URLs are structured (permalink/slug).

Routing can also be done with Apache's .htaccess file, or the equivalent in other web servers. FastPlaz tries to accommodate both: routing can be done via .htaccess or with the routing configuration.

Format

A route is written in Pascal like this:

Route['/permalink'] := TNamaController;

The permalink is written as a regex.

A Regular Expression, often written/called Regex/Regexp, is a sequence of special characters that defines a pattern for searching text.

Implementation

Suppose the url http://domain/customer is to be handled by the controller TCustomerController; the Pascal code looks like this:

Route['/customer'] := TCustomerController;

Custom Routing

You have probably seen long urls that still look clean because they don't use query string variables, like this:

https://www.fastplaz.com/2014/12/wordpress-loader-contoh-aplikasi-fastplaz/

These are common on online news sites, blogs and the like. The routing for such a uri looks roughly like this:

Route['^/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)/$'] := TNewsController; 

Likewise, to show a customer profile as http://localhost/customer/2/profile/.

// http://localhost/customer/2/profile/
Route['^/([0-9]+)/profile/$'] := TProfileModule; 

// handler uri: "/customer/{id}/"
Route['^/([0-9]+)'] := TCustomersModule; Route['/'] := TCustomersModule;

Reading Data

So how do you read the data?

It's easy: just like reading a regular query string, you still use _GET, except this time with an index matching the order of the regex parameters.

For example, for

Route['^/([0-9]+)/profile/$'] := TProfileModule; 

reading the customer id is as simple as

var
  customerID: string;

.
.  
customerID := _GET['$1'];

And for the news link routing in the example above

Route['^/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)/$'] := TNewsController; 

it is read like this:

var
  newsYear, newsMonth, newsTitle: string;

.
.  
newsYear := _GET['$1'];
newsMonth := _GET['$2'];
newsTitle := _GET['$3'];

Group Routing

The routing and data reading approach above is the simplest, but it can make reading variables awkward because you have to remember the index order.

Reading a url like this

https://www.fastplaz.com/2014/12/wordpress-loader-contoh-aplikasi-fastplaz/

would certainly be easier if you could read year, month and title directly as variables.

The routing pattern in the FastPlaz platform allows this using named group regex. The regex format is (?P<name>regex). The routing for the URL above then becomes:

Route['^/(?P<year>[0-9]+)/(?P<month>[0-9]+)/(?P<title>.*)/$'] := TNewsController; 

And the Pascal code to read those variables becomes:

var
  year, month, title: string;

.
.  
year := _GET['year'];
month := _GET['month'];
title := _GET['title'];

The routing is a bit longer to write, but it makes development easier.

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