Friendly links to call a controller task

Question

I developed an ecommerce component and I have the following problem that I hope you could help me.

The component has a locations manager where we can enlist cities such as: Madrid, London, Paris, Rome.

Then when the user selects a city the website will filter products and companies by that city.

If I choose Madrid I will see products available for Madrid only.

Normally we publish a module above that allows the user to change city if he/she wants by showing a list of cities.

The link of a city will call a task in my controller that sets a cookie with the city ID and redirects to home page.

Then the content is filtered on the web using the value of the cookie.

Sorry for the tedious introduction.

My question:

The links are like:

http://theweb.com/deal/dealSetLocationCookie?locationId=1 http://theweb.com/deal/dealSetLocationCookie?locationId=2

or

http://theweb.com/index.php?option=com_mycom&controller=deal&task=dealSetLocationCookie&locationId=2

and my customers want:

http://theweb.com/madrid

http://theweb.com/london

I guess I could create menu elements using the links, but that means lot more work because some costumers have lots of cities and it is necessary to have then registered in my component and also in the menu manager too.

Is there a way for my module to generate links like

http://theweb.com/madrid

but internally meaning http://theweb.com/deal/dealSetLocationCookie?locationId=1 ?

Or should I try to automatic generate menu elements from my locations manager, but how?

Any other idea.

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

Ofcourse you can use clean urls in your component. For this, you will need to modify the router.php file in your component for site.

Please refer the following link for it: https://docs.joomla.org/Supporting_SEF_URLs_in_your_component

Also you can refer the following example:

Function: ComponentNameBuildRoute in router.php :

function ComponentNameBuildRoute(&$query)
{
if(isset($query['view'])){
        $segments[] = $query['view'];
        unset($query['view']);
    }
if(isset($query['locationId'])){
        $segments[] = $query['locationId'];
        unset($query['locationId']);
    }
if(isset($query['task'])){
        $segments[] = $query['task'];
        unset($query['task']);
    }
}//function ends : here you add those paramaters passed by you in the link

Next function: ComponentNameParseRoute in router.php : Segment according to your indexing. This is just an example:

function ComponentNameParseRoute($segments){
    $vars = array();
    switch($segments[0])
           {
               case 'viewname1':
                       $vars['view'] = 'viewname1';
                       $vars['task'] = $segments[1];
                       $vars['locationId'] = $segments[2];
                       break;
                case 'viewname2':
                       $vars['view'] = 'viewname2';
                       $vars['locationId'] = $segments[0];
                       break;
    }
}

Hope this helps