Using Routes to load Controller

Question

I love routes, but they appear limited to loading a specific template. What about loading a plugin/controller based on the route instead? Anyway to do this in craft or am I limited to .htaccess?

Answer 1

This is indeed possible. You'll want to update your route to point to an array with and identify your controller path with the key action:

public function registerCpRoutes()
{
  return array(
    'pluginname/edit' => array('action' => 'pluginName/editItem'),
  );
}

In your plugin controller, you can create any number of variables you need and hand them off to your template as the second argument in the renderTemplate() method:

// PluginNameController.php
public function actionEditItem()
{
    // Create any variables you want available in your template
    $variables['variable'] = craft()->request->getSegment(3);       

    $variables['items'] = craft()->pluginName->getAllItems();

    // Load a particular template and with all of the variables you've created
    $this->renderTemplate('pluginname/_edit', $variables);
}

Check out the article How do I setup a route to point to a controller action instead of a template? on Straight Up Craft for a more in depth discussion that also goes into how to render the template from your control, hand off variables to your template, and reference multiple controllers.