Cakephp Faster Url Generation

28 August 2012

CakePHP faster URL generation

CakePHP framework provides a series of helpers to facilitate the creation of views of web systems. But one must note that each time you put a link in your view using a helper method, the Router::url() method is called and the URL string is computed.

The problem is when there is a page with many links. This links might have a common prefix (i.e. targeting the same controller/action). For example, the typical index actions shows a list of rows, and in each row there is a link to edit and delete. Generally this links follow the pattern /:controller/:action/:id.

The idea here is that is not necessary to compute the part /:controler/:action each time a URL is generated. We could cache this part.

In order to do that, we can rewrite the method url() of the app/AppHelper.php.

var $urls = array();
/* increases url performance in 50%, by "caching" urls */
function url($url = null, $full = false){
    if (
        $full || 
        !is_array($url) || 
        array_diff(
            array_keys($url), 
            array('controller', 'action', 0, 1, 2, 3, 4))){
        return parent::url($url, $full);
    }
    if (!isset($url['controller'])){
        $url['controller'] = $this->params['controller'];
    }
    if (!isset($url['action'])){
        $url['action'] = $this->params['action'];
    }
    $key = $url['controller'].'#'.$url['action'];
    if (!isset($this->urls[$key])){
        $pre = $this->urls[$key] = parent::url(array(
            'controller' => $url['controller'], 
            'action' => $url['action']));
    } else {
        $pre = $this->urls[$key];
    }
    for ($i=0; $i<4; $i++)
        if (isset($url[$i]))
            $pre.=DS.$url[$i];
    return $pre; 
}

webdev 2