[RFC] UrlComparerTrait::normalize including action parameters?

[raul338]

I have a navbar with 4 links, 3 of them are links to the Pages Controller (to display different pages)
Up to the 3.1.0 launch the url detection worked well, after the update all PagesController link are marked as visited.
Example (simplified w/o icons)

echo $this->Navbar->beginMenu();
echo $this->Navbar->link(__('Home'), [
    'controller' => 'Pages',
    'action' => 'display', 'home'
]);
echo $this->Navbar->link(__('Apartments'), [
    'controller' => 'Apartments',
    'action' => 'index'
]);
echo $this->Navbar->link(__('FAQ'), [
    'controller' => 'Pages',
    'action' => 'display', 'faq'
]);
echo $this->Navbar->link(__('General Conditions'), [
    'controller' => 'Pages',
    'action' => 'display', 'general-conditions'
]);
echo $this->Navbar->endMenu();

I can submit a PR to fix this, but some tests breaks, some are obvious, some others not like

1) Bootstrap\Test\TestCase\View\Helper\UrlComparerTraitTest::testFullBase
/cakephp/cakephp/admin/users/edit/1 != /cakephp/admin/users/edit
Failed asserting that false is true.

I think it should pass, but then I think how useful is a very specific link in a navbar...

Should I submit the PR? I would like have some consensus about it.

[Holt59]

This was something I was worried about when designing the comparer, unfortunately both your parameters (faq, home, ...) and the edit parameters (1) are treated in the same way by Cake...

One possibility would be to allow full or partial comparison, I will see if I can come up with something.

[Holt59]

I have just pushed a "fix" to the master branch (not the 3.1.0 tag), you can try it by requesting the dev-master branch.

The new behavior is basically:

UrlComparerTrait::compareUrls now check if the left URL is a parent of the right URL.

This should solve both issue because:

• /pages/home is not a parent of /pages/faq;
• /admin/users/edit is a parent of /admin/users/edit/1.

Let me know if it solves your problem without creating new ones... ;)

[raul338]

Thank you, It works 👏 👏

It could be better if you could specify such parent-checking in the 4th parameter of NavbarHelper::link()
So one could do this

// Only active if it is in /moderators/dashbard and not /moderators/dashbard/*
echo $this->Navbar->link(__('Dashboard'), [
    'controller' => 'Moderators',
    'action' => 'dashboard'
]);
echo $this->Navbar->link(
    __('Apartments'),
    [
        'controller' => 'Apartments',
        'action' => 'index'
    ],
    // I managed this way since the early days of NavbarHelper
    [], // ['class' => $this->name == 'Apartments' ? 'active' : ''],
    [
        'escape' => false,
        'active-sub-url' => true, // add "active" class if matches /apartments/*
    ]
);

Anyway, You can close the issue. Thanks again

[Holt59]

I have pushed another commit to add more flexibility. The default behavior of the autoActiveLink is to compare whole parts of the URL, so (right column is X if comparison returns true):

Link URL	Normalized	Current URL	Normalized
['controller' => 'Pages', 'action' => 'display', 'faq']	/pages/display/faq	/pages/faq	/pages/display/faq	X
['controller' => 'Pages', 'action' => 'display', 'faq']	/pages/display/faq	/pages/credots	/pages/display/credits
['controller' => 'Users', 'action' => 'edit']	/users/edit	/users/edit/1	/users/edit/1	X

But you can pass an array as the active options to the link method (the second param), typically:

echo $this->Navbar->link(
    __('Apartments'),
    [
        'controller' => 'Apartments',
        'action' => 'index'
    ],
    ['active' => ['action' => false, 'pass' => false]]
);

Now:

Link URL	Normalized	Current URL	Normalized
['controller' => 'Apartments', 'action' => 'index']	/apartments	/apartments/action	/apartments/action	X

The current URL will never be altered by the option, only the link URL is modified.

I will add more information to the documentation when I have time.

[Holt59]

I have added this to the documentation:

http://holt59.github.io/cakephp3-bootstrap-helpers/navbar-helper/auto-active-link/

I am closing this, feel free to (re-)open if you have any troubles!