I spent waaaay to many hours trying to load routes via a config file in Zend Framework 1.10 and I think this might be a problem with the documentation I was following on the Zend Framework site. More on that later, let’s get to my solution first.

Here is the use case I am addressing: I want to store routes in a .ini file and have this file loaded via the Application Bootstrap. Zend Application allows me to store these in the application.ini file but I have a large number and want to store them separately.

First create your routes.ini file:

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[production]
routes.linkA.route = "linkA"
routes.linkA.defaults.controller = "linkB"
routes.linkA.defaults.action = "linkBAction"

Where linkA is the incoming route and linkB is the outgoing route

New let’s add the function to load this file in the Bootstrap. Add the following to your boostrap.php:

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protected function _initRewrite() {
    $front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
    $router = $front->getRouter();
   
    $config = new Zend_Config_Ini(APPLICATION_PATH . '/configs/routes.ini', 'production');      
    $router->addConfig($config,'routes');
} 

That’s it, everything should be working :-)

The above use case is addressed in the Zend Framework Documentation but I could not get their example to work:

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.controller.router.html

Using Zend_Config with the RewriteRouter
Sometimes it is more convenient to update a configuration file with
new routes than to change the code. This is possible via
the addConfig() method.
 
…
 
$config = new Zend_Config_Ini(‘/path/to/config.ini’, ‘production’);
$router = new Zend_Controller_Router_Rewrite();
$router->addConfig($config, ‘routes’);

No matter how hard I tried I could not get the above to work. It is very simple code but there are no instructions on where this can/should be run. Maybe this can’t be run from the bootstrap? I even wrote a plugin and but no matter what I tried I could not get this to work using Zend_Controller_Router_Rewrite().

It is also possible that I completely mis-understood the documentation and got all mixed up, I struggle with Zend Documentation sometimes.

If you figure out how to do this using Zend_Controller_Router_Rewrite() please leave a comment it was driving me nuts!