Comparing route to current request in Symfony

Question

For my site navigation I'd like to indicate the current page. If each page in the navigation has its own route is there a way to see if the current request matches the route? Something like:

$request->getRoute() == '@my_route'

Or, more generally, is there an idiomatic way of setting the active page when creating site navigation in Symfony?

Answer 1

You could try work with the following:

In template:
$route = $sf_context->getInstance()->getRouting()->getCurrentRouteName();

In action:
$route = sfContext::getInstance()->getRouting()->getCurrentRouteName();

What it returns is the route name as you've defined in routing. So for example if you've got a routing rule called "@search_results", the above method would return "search_results".

Maybe there's a better way, but I'm also using this to set the current active page in my layouts... by adding a "selected" class to a navigation element if the current route name matches "xxx".

Answer 2

I've created a helper, added it to the standard_helpers and I create navigations links using this instead of link_to:

function thu_menu($name, $uri, $options = array())
{
  return link_to_unless(strpos(sfContext::getInstance()->getRouting()->getCurrentInternalUri(true), $uri) !== false, $name, $uri, $options);
}

I don't like sfContext::getInstance(), but this was the only way that I found.

Answer 3

Or, more generally, is there an idiomatic way of setting the active page when creating site navigation in Symfony?

Don't use sfContext::getInstance(), route names or internal uris for this. There are several ways to achieve navigation menu highlighting with Symfony, personnaly I like setting a request attribute (eg. in a controller), like this:

<?php
// ...
  public function executeFoo(sfWebRequest $request)
  {
    $request->setAttribute('section', 'blah');
  }

Then in your template:

<ul>
  <li class="<?php echo 'blah' === $sf_request->getAttribute('section') ? 'active' : '' ?>">
    <a href="<php echo url_for('@my_route') ?>">Blah</a>
  </li>
</ul>

You can even add the section parameter from your routes in the routing.yml file:

my_route:
  url: /foo
  param: { module: foo, action: bar, section: blah }

Then in your template if you do so, be careful to check for a request parameter nstead of an attribute:

<ul>
  <li class="<?php echo 'blah' === $sf_request->getParameter('section') ? 'active' : '' ?>">
    <a href="<php echo url_for('@my_route') ?>">Blah</a>
  </li>
</ul>

Simple yet efficient, right? But f you need more complex navigatioin (especially nested menus), you should be thinking using some more full-featured plugins or symfony-based CMSes like Sympal, Diem or ApostropheCMS.