Need some help by custom component routing and menupoints

Question

I am trying to write a custom component router. I have these admin and site uri structures: http://localhost/administrator/index.php?option=com_{component_name}&... and http://localhost/index.php/{language_code}/{an_alias}/.... Is there a way to get these uri structures programmatically. The admin part is okay, but by the site part I am lost. I can add any menupoint with a generated alias, which is not predictable. Is there a way to get this info from the joomla site router or enforce a constraint on the menupoint?

Currently I have a com_example/views/example/tmpl/default.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<metadata>
    <layout title="COM_CANTEEN_TITLE">
        <message><![CDATA[COM_CANTEEN_DESCRIPTION]]></message>
    </layout>
</metadata>

which is enough to add a site menupoint, which points to the component. It would be nice to add multilingual menupoint title and alias to this, so it would not be possible to add a menupoint with a different alias. Actually I don't want to follow the MVC structure by the component, I'd like to route and handle requests from the entry, let's call it com_example/example.php. It would be nice to have this template xml file in the com_example/Example/presentation/menupoints/ if that is possible.

Answer 1

It is possible to use the router, which finds the component to create a base uri for the component.

$application = JFactory::getApplication();
$router = $application->getRouter();
$componentUri = $router->build('index.php?option=com_example');

This will return /administrator/index.php?option=com_example by admin pages and something like /index.php/en/alias by site pages if you defined a menu point for the component with an alias. A drawback that this solution does not work properly if I access the site using the /index.php/en/?option=com_example URI, so without using a menu point. It returns something like /index.php/en/component/example/, which leads to a 404 page. This is not a real issue as long as we are trying to access the site pages with the alias containing URI.

Another alternative way to use the JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_example') code, which does the exact same thing.

By default there is a legacy component router instantiated by the app, but it is not necessary to use it. I decided to write a custom router instead and I annotated my controllers and actions with the necessary info. So the approach is somewhat similar to java rest webservices.

I did not have time to find a solution for moving the xml file, it is not a priority now.