Codeigniter routing URL with product name to product id - .htaccess

Question

I need to redirect the URLs like this http://mysite.com/store/store-name to http://mysite.com/stores/products/store-id. Note that i need to get the store id from the database. So is it possible to do db operations in routes.php?
And in documentation the syntax is give as $route['store/:any']. How to get the value of second parameter here which is mentioned as :any.

Answer 1

There's not really any good nor simple way of running database queries through the routes. You can however have in the beginning of the controller function a validation.
I asume your store-name is some sort of slug for the product? Basicly you can validate if value is numeric or not, and if not find by slug and then redirect.
config/routes.php
$route["store/(.*)"] = 'stores/products/$1';
/* () and $1 together passes the values */
controllers/stores.php
/* Class etc. */
function products($mix) {
if (is_numeric($mix))
$int_id = $mix;
else {
$row = $this->get_where('products', array('slug' => $mix))->row();
$this->load->helper('url');
redirect("stores/products/{$row->id}");
}
/* Do stuff with the $int_id */
}
This asumes that you have:
A table named products
A column named id that's your products id
A column named slug that that's based on your store-name

Answer 2

I may be a little late to the party, but I may have an alternative suggestion.
I use the following for my routes:
http://mysite.com/store/1/store-name
Reason being... Based on your method, if you create
http://mysite.com/store/store-name
but then after a period of time (of which no doubt Google has indexed your page) you decide for what ever reason you have to change the name of the store to "Wonderful store name", you would naturally change your link to
http://mysite.com/store/wonderful-store-name
Which kills your SEO and any index links.
My solution of using http://mysite.com/store/1/store-name means that you can change store-name to anything you want, but it will always reference 1 meaning the user will still see the related page.

Answer 3

Anything is possible with CodeIgniter routes. Its all in the way you code it. Routing in CI is really flexible. You can use regular expressions besides the standard CI wildcards (:any)(:num). You can even add prefixes or suffixes to the path variables if you have to like:
$route['store/(:any)'] = "redircontroller/redirfunction/$1";
// for instance the namelookup method of the mystores controller
$route['stores/products/(:any)'] = "mystores/namelookup/$1";
You get the second parameter(and third and so on) by defining the variables in your route value which get passed to the controller method you define. If 'products' in you new url is also a variant you should start your wildcard expression there instead. You could also pull parameters out of the url using the URI class ($this->uri->segment(n)).
You don't, however, do database operations in routes.php. You do your database operations in the controller where you route to. My guess is that you'll have to match the store id using whatever is used in the url in a query.
In any case the path that you are using the routes file for is the path the user will see. To do the redirect you have to accept the original path and then redirect the user to the new path like so:
// in some controller that's attached to the original url
public function redirfunct($var){
$this->load->helper('url');
redirect(base_url('stores/products/' . $var));
}
I hope this helps you.

Answer 4

Yes that is easy, you only need to show the ID instead of the name,
you must be doing like storeName> Click to view details
Make it as
storeId> Click to view details
and when you are passing the parameter to the database, change the check of mysql, change it to id instead of name , that can be some like
" select yourRequiredColumn from table_name where id=".parameter."
Thanks