How to Pass Extra Information from a Route to a Controller

Parameters inside the defaults collection don't necessarily have to match a placeholder in the route path. In fact, you can use the defaults array to specify extra parameters that will then be accessible as arguments to your controller, and as attributes of the Request object:

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# app/config/routing.yml
blog:
    path:      /blog/{page}
    defaults:
        _controller: AppBundle:Blog:index
        page:        1
        title:       "Hello world!"

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<!-- app/config/routing.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<routes xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/routing"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/routing
        http://symfony.com/schema/routing/routing-1.0.xsd">

    <route id="blog" path="/blog/{page}">
        <default key="_controller">AppBundle:Blog:index</default>
        <default key="page">1</default>
        <default key="title">Hello world!</default>
    </route>
</routes>

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// app/config/routing.php
use Symfony\Component\Routing\RouteCollection;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Route;

$routes = new RouteCollection();
$routes->add('blog', new Route('/blog/{page}', array(
    '_controller' => 'AppBundle:Blog:index',
    'page'        => 1,
    'title'       => 'Hello world!',
)));

return $routes;

Now, you can access this extra parameter in your controller, as an argument to the controller method:

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public function indexAction($page, $title)
{
    // ...
}

Alternatively, the title could be accessed through the Request object:

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use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;

public function indexAction(Request $request, $page)
{
    $title = $request->attributes->get('title');

    // ...
}

As you can see, the $title variable was never defined inside the route path, but you can still access its value from inside your controller, through the method's argument, or from the Request object's attributes bag.