Front Controller

The front controller is a collective term for the routes that your web application defines for its various endpoints. This is how UserFrosting links URLs and methods to your application's code.

Sprinkles define their routes in classes and register them in their Recipe. There are two ways to define a route - as a closure, or as a reference to a controller class method. We will use a simple closure example here to illustrate the concept, but for your application, you should create controller classes.

The following is an example of a GET route:

$app->get('/api/users/u/{username}', function (string $username, Request $request, Response $response, array $args) 
{
    $getParams = $request->getQueryParams();

    $result = User::where('user_name', $username)->get();

    if ($getParams['format'] == 'json') {
        $payload = json_encode($result, JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR | JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);
        $response->getBody()->write($payload);
    } else {
        return $response->getBody()->write("No format specified");
    }
});

This is a very simplified example, but it illustrates the main features of a route definition. First, there is the call to $app->get(). The get refers to the HTTP method for which this route is defined. You may also define post(), put(), delete(), options(), and patch() routes.

The first parameter is the URL for the route. Routes can contain placeholders such as {username} to match arbitrary values in a portion of the URL. These placeholders can even be matched according to regular expressions: see the Slim documentation and PHP-DI Slim's Bridge Documentation for a complete guide to URL placeholders.

After the URL comes the closure, where we place our actual route logic. In this example, the closure uses three parameters - a placeholder variable, the request object (which contains all the information from the client request), and the response object (which is used to build the response that the server sends back to the client). These parameters can vary from route to route. Behind the scenes, PHP-DI will intelligently inject the proper services and variables into the closure--more on that in a bit.

In the example above, we use the username placeholder to look up information for that user from the database. We then use the value of the format query parameter from the request to decide what to put in the response. You'll notice that the closure writes to the body of the $response object before returning. Slim will return the response to the client, perhaps first modifying it further through the use of middleware.

For a more detailed guide to routes, we highly recommend that you read the Slim documentation and PHP-DI Slim's Bridge Documentation.