CakePHP Pagination & Custom Routes Issue

Custom Routes are something that make CakePHP very interesting! If you are reading this post you must have experimented with what we call custom routing. The problem might arise when we want to paginate models which use custom routing.

The problems may be many-folded which all simplifies to one simple issue:

UNFORMATTED URL
Say, you want to display url in the following format using custom routes

CakePHP default url structure
http://example.com/categories/index/categoryID

Your WELL FORMATTED URL structure:
http://example.com/category-name-ID

Obviously, your custom route element points to 'index' action of 'categories' controller with two parameters - category-name and 'categoryID'.

Router::connect(

 '/:slug-:id/*',
  array('controller' => 'categories', 'action' => 'index'),
  array(
  // order matters
  'pass' => array('slug','id'),
 'id'=> '[0-9]+'
  )
  );

This works perfectly for URLs like

http://example.com/my-first-category-ID1

http://example.com/my-second-category-ID2

But it may cause problem when you try to paginate

Cake will not pick  your params (here 'slug' and 'id') passed through url if you do not force Cake to do so while paginating.  

To fix this issue, you MAY use:

 $paginator->options(array('url' => $this->passedArgs));  

or, as I have told here earlier following CakePHP book.

But this will format your paginated urls like

http://example.com/categories/index/param1/param2/page:xxxx

You can obviously browse pages with the above url. But it does not look decent. So, your entire effort with custom routing might just not work. 

You may still get a bad URL.

DO NOT WORRY!

While defining paginator options in your view file, follow religiously $html->link() structure. For an example I have put forward the structure of  $paginator->options() below in a view file:

file:// /app/views/categories/index.php

$paginator->options(array('url'=> array(

'controller' => 'categories', 

  'action' => 'index',

'slug'=>$this->params['slug']),

'id'=>$this->params['id'])

  ));

Now Cake will make well formatted URL automatically, and your paginated url should look like

http://example.com/category-name-id1/page:2

http://example.com/category-name-id1/page:3

Done!

I hope it helps someone.

Does it?

Please Note

I have marked asterisk symbol (*) with RED color while talking about custom route elements. This (*) MUST be there for pagination to work properly. 

Good night.