Looking up Routes from a Database: Symfony CMF DynamicRouter

The core Symfony Routing System is excellent at handling complex sets of routes. A highly optimized routing cache is dumped during deployments.

However, when working with large amounts of data that each need a nice readable URL (e.g. for search engine optimization purposes), the routing can get slowed down. Additionally, if routes need to be edited by users, the route cache would need to be rebuilt frequently.

For these cases, the DynamicRouter offers an alternative approach:

• Routes are stored in a database;
• There is a database index on the path field, the lookup scales to huge numbers of different routes;
• Writes only affect the index of the database, which is very efficient.

When all routes are known during deploy time and the number is not too high, using a custom route loader is the preferred way to add more routes. When working with only one type of objects, a slug parameter on the object and the @ParamConverter annotation works fine (see FrameworkExtraBundle) .

The DynamicRouter is useful when you need Route objects with the full feature set of Symfony. Each route can define a specific controller so you can decouple the URL structure from your application logic.

The DynamicRouter comes with built-in support for Doctrine ORM and Doctrine PHPCR-ODM but offers the ContentRepositoryInterface to write a custom loader, e.g. for another database type or a REST API or anything else.

The DynamicRouter is explained in the Symfony CMF documentation.