codeigniter conditional routing

Question

I am trying to setup routing based on the 1st URI segment.

I have a rule:

$route['(:any)'] = pages/view_page/$1;

I want to make my routes conditional so that if a controller of the name of URI segment 1 is called it goes to the controller as normal. If no controller exists then go to the pages/view_page function.

I have tried wrapping the $route rule with an if statement that checks URI segment 1 and uses that to see if a file exists to match it but this doesn't seem to work.

Does anybody have any suggestions for how to do this without having to write lots of route configurations.

Answer 1

Since the routing overrides are simple regexp based transformations, you can't really embed "is that would work otherwise" kind of logic directly. This leaves you with basically two options:

1. List the routes you want to be working explicitly before the "catch all" (:any) rule
2. Use the $route['404_override'] reserved route instead to indicate what controller should be loaded when no controller found otherwise. However, check the urls comming in and call show_404() and output proper 404 http status code for missing static assets and such.