Arguments from URL into a node under cleanURLs?

That's a darn good question. The answer is yes you can, but it's not intuitive and does require a little coding. There is more than one way to do this.

There are a few things going on here to know about. When we are dealing with aliases realize the whole thing is an alias. When drupal gets the url it reads it to see if that is an alias. There are no arguments in an alias. The whole thing is an alias.

So, what we need to do is either write a custom module or we can intercept the url and do stuff to it to make it into arguments. Please note, this is for advanced users.

The funciton to check out is the custom_url_rewrite optional function you can put in your settings.php file. http://api.drupal.org/api/function/custom_url_rewr...

Here is an example use of the function...

<?php
function custom_url_rewrite($op, $result, $path, $path_language) {
  if ($op == 'alias') {
    //create an alias for the node
    if ($path == 'node/x') {
      $result = 'xyzzy/var1/var2';
    }
  }
  if ($op == 'source') {
    //read the result in and do something to it.

    $url_explode = explode('/', $path);
    if ($url_explode[0] == 'xyzzy') {
      $result = 'node/x?';
      for ($i = 1; $i <= count($url_explode); $i++) {
        $result.= 'var'. $i .'='. $url_explode[$i] .'&';
      }
    }
  }

  return $result;
?>

Granted, this is crude. And my code here is untested and a proof of concept for your idea. If you are going to do this in one or 2 places it would work. If you are going to use it often it might be better to build a simple module that provides this feature but scales better.

Hope this helps. Aliases really weren't meant for this so it's a bit of a push and bend.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

January 11, 2008 - 10:16am

Matt Farina

G&G Podcast Host

Joined: 06/01/2006

darn good question