Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 10Routes

Out of the box, Cake intercepts all URLs and maps them to their appropriate controllers and actions. This is a wonderful aspect of the framework that improves the speed of developing applications. Rather than having long strings of passed variables in the URL or creating dozens of individual scripts to handle every function in the application, Cake's routing system manages all the requests, as you saw in previous chapters. But what about customizing the routing scheme? Or what if you want to generate non-HTML files such as PDFs, RSS feeds, or some kind of XML output? And what about search engine optimization? For these purposes, Cake's routing features will remove the headache of mapping URLs, handling dynamic requests, and ...