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POBest way to define your web application URLs
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  1. POBest way to define your web application URLs
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    copied!<p>I've always found that defining URLs for other "pages" in a Web Application seems either clumbsy and fragile or bloated.</p> <p>E.g. you have an application that manages customers, sales, prospects and thus has the following "pages".</p> <ul> <li>customerlist</li> <li>viewcustomer</li> <li>editcustomer</li> <li>addcustomer</li> <li>viewcontact</li> <li>editcontact</li> <li>addcontact</li> <li>prospect (x3? x4?)</li> <li>sales (x?)</li> <li>product (x?)</li> <li>request (x?)</li> <li>forecast (x?)</li> <li>etc. ...</li> </ul> <p>As an application grows, the number of pages grows to a list of 100+ URLs in no time.</p> <p>Logic says that just copy/pasting these URLs in where needed on a page is ugly and a pain to maintain, but loading up 100+ key/values seems redundant if you only need 2 or 3 of them on "this" page.</p> <p>Technically this is a language-agnostic (ASP,JSP,PHP,RoR,Python,etc.) question but I intend to implement in PHP (in an MVC setup). However if ASP.Net or Rails has a "really cool" way of doing this I'm all ears.</p> <p><strong>Update:</strong></p> <p>I'm mid-way through converting a non-MVC PHP app to use an MVC structure. Previously I had a big set of key'd links that were the base URL for a page, e.g.:</p> <pre><code>$URLs['CUSTOMER_ORDER_CONTACTS'] = '/customerordercontacts.php'; $URLs['CUSTOMER_PRODUCTS_EDIT'] = '/editcustomerproducts.php'; //etc. </code></pre> <p>Since I might be linking to the "Customer Products Edit" screen from anywhere, each page loaded this list, so that if/when the URL changed to another page... changing the item in the list would update all links.</p> <p>However as I read the answers here I think I might have answered my own question by accident. What @Blixt wrote is pretty much the structure I have/plan to follow... at which point the URL is really <strong><em>structured</em></strong> in such a way that <em>I don't need to have this list at all</em>:</p> <p>Example: If I am rendering a customer... and want to provide a link to each contact</p> <pre><code>//pseudo code $contacts = $customer.getContacts(); //previous rendering list of links foreach($contacts as $key =&gt; $value){ echo('&lt;a href="'.$URLs['CUSTOMER_CONTACT_VIEW'].'?customer='.$custID.'&amp;contact='.$key.'"&gt;'.$value.'&lt;/a&gt;'); } //new rendering list of links foreach($contacts as $key =&gt; $value){ echo('&lt;a href="/customer/'.$custID.'/contact/'.$key.'"&gt;'.$value.'&lt;/a&gt;'); } </code></pre>
 

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