Routing and Controllers

Routing

By default, Blink's routing configuration is located at src/http/routes.php, this file should return a array that contains all route definitions for the application.

The following is a simple route definition:

<?php
return [
    ['GET', '/', function () {
        return 'hello world';
    }],
    ['GET', '/foo/bar', function () {
        return 'hello foo bar';
    }]
];

It is also possible to specify multiple HTTP Verb for a single definition, for example:

return [
    [['GET', 'HEAD'], '/', function () {
        // both GET and HEAD requests to '/'  will be handled by this function
        return 'hello world';
    }]
];

Routing with Parameters

We can define a route with parameters by using {param} syntax , the param is the name. When a route have parameters defined, the handler of the route should accept all its parameters by the order when defined. The following example defined two parameters with type and id:

return [
    ['GET', '/users/{type}/{id}', function ($type, $id) {
        // we can access all the defined parameters in its handler function by the order when defined
    }]
];

The simple example above is already working petty well for us, and all the following URL are valid:

/users/foo/123
/users/321/bar
/users/foo/bar

But in actually, we probably want more limitations on the type of the parameters, lets say type should be string and id should be integer, what should we do?

In Blink, we can also define a route by using regex patterns, the syntax is {param:expression}. With this syntax we define a route like the following to fit our need:

return [
    ['GET', '/users/{type:[a-zA-Z]+}/{id:\d+}', function ($type, $id) {
        // by now, type will be a valid string and id will be an valid integer
    }]
];

Route Groups

In large projects, in order to manage routes more efficiently, it is possible split routes into multiple groups, each group have it's own prefix.

return [
    ['/api', [
        ['GET', '/foo', 'handler1']
        ['GET', '/bar', 'handler2']
    ]]
];

The example above defined a route group that prefixed with /api. A route group requires two components, the prefix and the sub-routes definitions.

Controller

Except the anonymous function we used before as the route handler, we can also use syntax like ClassName@method to specify class method as route handler. Here is the example:

return [
    ['GET', '/', '\app\http\controllers\IndexController@index']
];

In the example above, the controller is a fully qualified class name, but in practice, it is possible to combine the controllerNamespace configuration from src/config/app.php to simplify our route definition, the following example will behave the same result exactly:

src/config/app.php

return [
    'controllerNamespace' => '\app\http\controllers',
];

src/http/routes.php

return [
    ['GET', '/', 'IndexController@index']
];

Dependency Injection

The controllers in Blink support both constructor and method injection, we can inject what ever we want into our controller very conveniently. The following is a simple example showing how dependency injection will work in controller classes:

use blink\core\Object;
use blink\http\Request;

class Controller extends Object
{
    /**
     * Inject Request object via class constructor
     */
    public function __construct(Request $request, $config = [])
    {

        parent::__construct();
    }

    /**
     * Inject Request object via class method
     *
     * @param $id the id parameter from route definition
     * @param $request The injected request object
     */
    public function index($id, Request $request)
    {

    }
}