Doing rails-like RESTful resources is not natively possible with symfony, but with a bit of tweaking you can get closer to it.

The problem

Thanks to routing requirements, you can restrict the cases where a route matches a URL.

show_article:
  url: /article/:id
  params: { module: article, action: show }
  requirements: { id: \d+ }

What I sometimes miss, is the ability to add a HTTP request method requirement, i.e. making a route match only if the request is GET, or POST, or DELETE. This is really useful when designing RESTful resources, where a single external URL can match more than one resource, depending on the request method:

show_article:
  url: /article/:id
  params: { module: article, action: show }
  requirements: { id: \d+, sf_method: get }

update_article:
  url: /article/:id
  params: { module: article, action: update }
  requirements: { id: \d+, sf_method: post }

delete_article:
  url: /article/:id
  params: { module: article, action: delete }
  requirements: { id: \d+, sf_method: delete }

The solution

In order to allow symfony to do that, you need to modify two symfony classes: sfWebRequest and sfPatternRouting. As both of these classes are controlled by a factory in symfony 1.1, I recommend creating two custom classes, one for the request and one for the routing. Download these two classes here, and place them under the application lib/ folder. Now all you need is to edit your factories.yml to use these classes instead of the default ones:

all:
  request:
    class: myWebRequest
  routing:
    class: myPatternRouting

Clear the cache, and now you can add method requirements to your routing rules, as explained above.

In order to create a link to a route with a requirement other than sf_method: get, you must pass the sf_method parameter to url_for() explicitly (don't worry, it will not end up in the external URL):

What's next

Note that this is just a proof-of-concept, and to be perfectly RESTful, link_to() should generate a form doing a POST request when sf_method=post is passed. Also, the routing configuration handler could be modified to transform a single RESTful rule:

article:
  restful:
    base_url: /articles
    module:   article
    identifier: id

Into a list of normal rules:

# display a list of articles
list_article:
  url: /articles
  params: { module: article, action: index }
  requirements: { sf_method: get }

# display a single article
show_article:
  url: /articles/:id
  params: { module: article, action: show }
  requirements: { id: \d+, sf_method: get }

# display an empty form for a new article
new_article:
  url: /articles/new
  params: { module: article, action: new }
  requirements: { sf_method: get }

# handle the submission of a new article form
create_article:
  url: /articles/new
  params: { module: article, action: create }
  requirements: { sf_method: post }

# display a form to edit an existing article
edit_article:
  url: /articles/:id/edit
  params: { module: article, action: edit }
  requirements: { id: \d+, sf_method: get }

update_article:
  url: /articles/:id/edit
  params: { module: article, action: update }
  requirements: { id: \d+, sf_method: post }

delete_article:
  url: /articles/:id
  params: { module: article, action: delete }
  requirements: { id: \d+, sf_method: delete }

I leave that to your sagacity.

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• The future of symfony routing
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• Chapter 10 - Forms
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