How to create routes with unlimited sub-pages in Laravel?

Question

Is there any way to capture unlimited levels of URLs of sub-pages. My application allows any user to create any level of sub-pages. In my pages table I have parentID.

/{page}/{subpage} // this captures 2 level of pages
/{page} // this captures 1 level of page

I want to capture all URLs ranging from

site.com/food/healthy/fruit/red/apple to site.com/fruit/organge or site.com/grapes or site.com/a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h/i/j and so on.

what would be the most efficient way?

Answer 1

Sure it's possible. You'd need to explode the captured pages on the slash / and go from there though.

Route::any('{any}', function($pages)
{
    $pages = explode('/', $pages);

    // Do whatever...
})->where('any', '.*');

A few things to be aware of:

1. This route should be placed last, otherwise you won't be able to hit any other routes.
2. This captures absolutely everything, you'll need to return an error should the page not exist.
3. I'm using Route::any in the above to capture any request (POST, GET, etc), you might want to limit this to a subset of those or only GET, that's up to you.
4. As pointed out in the comments below, you can no longer use the URL::route helper but you can still make use of the URL::to helper. This shouldn't be a problem as it's more than likely you're storing these dynamic pages in a database and as such the URI should be stored within the database as well.