Bug: Route Filters Are Ignored When Using Custom Placeholders in Routing

[frkiergn]

PHP Version

8.3

CodeIgniter4 Version

4.6.3

CodeIgniter4 Installation Method

Composer (using codeigniter4/appstarter)

Which operating systems have you tested for this bug?

Windows, Linux

Which server did you use?

apache

Database

No response

What happened?

When defining a custom placeholder in CodeIgniter 4 routing, the routes that use this placeholder do not execute the filters assigned to them. The framework seems to completely skip the filter layer for those routes.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a custom placeholder in app/Config/Routes.php:

$routes->addPlaceholder('code', '[A-Z]{3}[0-9]+')

2. Define a route using this placeholder and apply filters:

$routes->get('test/(:code)', 'TestController::index', ['filter' => 'auth']);

3. Access a URL matching the pattern:

/test/ABC123

4. Observe that the auth filter does not run.

5. Check the defined filter from the listed routes using the php spark routes command.

| Method | Route | Name | Handler | Before Filters | After Filters  
| GET    | test/([A-Za-z]+-[A-Za-z0-9]+) | » | \App\Controllers\Test::index/$1 | <unknown>   | <unknown>  

Additional Notes

• Filters work correctly when using standard placeholders.
• The issue appears only when using custom placeholders created via addPlaceholder().

Expected Output

Filters defined for a route that uses a custom placeholder should run normally, the same way they run with the default placeholders ((:num), (:segment), etc.).

Anything else?

No response

[michalsn]

Thank you for reporting. I can only confirm this partially.

For the case you described, following the provided steps, I was able to run filters correctly.

However, the issue still persists with the php spark routes command.

I haven't worked closely with this part of the framework before, but it seems that SampleURIGenerator::samples is used to detect the correct placeholder pattern. We likely need a way to seed SampleURIGenerator with custom samples for new placeholders. Perhaps we could store them in app/Config/Routing.php, though I'm not entirely sure this is the best way to handle this.