Document to NEVER use getRouteCollection() / how to check if route exists

[wouterj]

It isn't clear for people to not use Router#getRouteCollection(). Using this method will regenerate the Routing cache on each request, making apps very slow. I think we should explicitely tell people to not use this method.

A common use case of this method seems to be checking whether a route exists (symfony/symfony#19270, http://stackoverflow.com/q/14136484/1149495, http://stackoverflow.com/q/17241235/1149495, etc.). Maybe we can document to catch the RouteNotFoundException in such cases and then explain to not use getRouteCollection().

[javiereguiluz]

@wouterj Symfony provides hasXXX() methods for (almost) everything. Do you know why there isn't a hasRoute() method? Thanks

(In any case, an application which is not sure about its own routes and needs to check if they exist, looks fragile to me).

[wouterj]

(In any case, an application which is not sure about its own routes and needs to check if they exist, looks fragile to me).

It's less fragile than you might think. Take for example a site using the CMF Routing bundle, which loads routes from a database. An admin might create/remove routes that an app depends on. For example, in the CMF we had to manage the case of a menu item trying to link to a route that was removed.

Symfony provides hasXXX() methods for (almost) everything. Do you know why there isn't a hasRoute() method? Thanks

The router is dumped in cache. This removes the complete $routes array and uses static matching instead (using many nested if statements and such). So in fact, the router doesn't really know about the available routes in production (when it's cached).

The cached generator has a hash map of route name -> route tokens mappings. We might be able to reuse that hash map in the router, but not sure if it's worth it.

[ogizanagi]

@wouterj: But providing a new Router::hasRoute($name) method in which we can try to generate the route or catch the RouteNotFoundException would help avoiding people to rely on the Router::getRouteCollection() method on runtime. What do you think ?

[TiMESPLiNTER]

Maybe we should even consider to set this method to protected? It's only used at one place which is not in the Router class itself (constructor of Symfony\Bundle\WebProfilerBundle\Controller\RouterController). Or at least mark it as @internal.

[mikeploeger]

My URL structure is like facebook/twitter:
site.com/Username

To let the user set the username, I need to check if a path of a route matches a username.
If getRouteCollection() should not be used, whats the correct way of checking this?

A hasRoute() method like the one in the referenced issue wouldn't help because it only checks by route name and not path.

Update, found the answer:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45871463/how-to-check-for-absolute-paths-routes-in-symfony

[javiereguiluz]

Fixed by #9845.