How To Get HTTP Request Information In Zend Framework

Getting the current URL in a Zend Application is useful for when building templates and navigations. Luckily the designers of Zend Framework have made the process as simple as calling several different methods from your Zend application.

Zend Framework makes use of several different design patterns. One of them is the singleton design pattern. This design can be simplified by thinking of it as a global variable: it can be accessed and changed at any time. Normally this practice is frowned upon because it leads to poor code, but the Zend Framework front controller makes use of this to provide HTTP request information to the developer at any point in the framework stack. It’s one of the few times this pattern is considered acceptable.

When working in the view the developer is limited to what he or she may do. This is because the view is not supposed to have any logic code in it. To remedy this, Zend Framework developers created the Server Url view helper. It returns the URI or URL to build a base URL path. When further elements from the request object are needed, developers should instead put logic in the controller and access the data by passing it to the view.

The controller extends the basic Zend Controller Action. With this class you can access HTTP request information through several different methods. You are able to access the scheme, domain, controller, action, path information, and parameters if they are present. You will have to piece all of these variables together to build a URI. It’s more work than in the view because we don’t use the view helper here.

The library files you work with likely will not extend the Zend Controller Action. Thus, you won’t have direct access to the request object. The good news is that the front controller is a singleton, as we discussed earlier. This means that all a developer needs to do is create a new instance of the object and then access the HTTP request just like in the controller. While this is very helpful, it’s recommended that developers not make their own singletons in this fashion.

The base URL helper is another option for those who don’t want to build the root path every time they need to build a link. The base URL helper is set in the application configuration file or in the bootstrap. There are several implementations of this functionality, so use what best works for your application. This is as close to a singleton object as you should get to making your own global helper file.

Final Thoughts

PHP makes it easy to access HTTP request information through global server variables. While that is easy, it’s not exactly considered ideal for MVC design. Use the Zend Framework implementation of the HTTP request object so your code is clean, concise, and consistent with the design goals of the Zend Framework project.

This Zend Framework tutorial was written by Chris Channing. See more of his development and thoughts on zend framework get url parameters.