A special application state issue - yii

Question

I am developing a facebook like social networking website using Yii framework. As a logged in user can see profile of any user they got while searching or by other means. in facebook it happens like
facebook.com/marthajoseph/photos
Here the user is viewing the profile of "marthajoseph". Same thing I want to achieve in yii.
Currently I did something like this
myapplication.com/index.php?r=u/default/index?uid=110
Here "u" is a model for users.
Here I am viewing profile of the user with user id "110". The issue is each time I switch the user's photos, profile, posts etc I have to append this uid query string with the url which leads to instability.
How can I achieve the facebook like thing?

Answer 1

I would suggest rewriting the URL completely using the Yii URL Management as mentioned by ernie above
First of all, use path format for the URL. This is done by firstly un-commenting the urlManager lines in protected/config/main.php (around line 34 by default). What this does is let you use "pretty URLs", for example, instead of the URL looking something like this:
www.example.com/index.php?r=user/profile?uid=110
You can have it something like this:
www.example.com/user/110
So, for example, if we wanted to route any URL which has the structure profile/<a users id> to our User Controllers view action (actionView), we could do something like:
'urlManager'=>array(
'urlFormat' => 'path',
'showScriptName' => false,
'rules' => array(
'user/profile/<id:.+>' => 'user/view',
...
So on the left side of the array we have "what the URL will look like", and on the right we have "where it is pointing". You can then access the id value in your view or in your controller using a $_GET, for example:
echo "You are viewing user id ".$_GET['id'];
You could use this value to query for photos or profile content or whatever associated with that user. In terms of having the users name in the URL (how facebook does it, eg: facebook.com/myusername), you would most likely let the user enter their vanity URL somewhere along the line and store that in the database. You could then change your rule to something like:
'user/profile/<user_vanity_url:.+>' => 'user/view',
And then access that value the same as above using a $_GET. One piece of advice if you go this route is to keep in mind that you should be preventing users from making being able to view content they are not allowed to view, for example, viewing the photos of someone who is not their friend. I would assume you have some sort of table storing these relations?
In regards to having to append the id or whatever value you are passing through the URL, you can simply append it in the view or wherever your HTML is being created, so for example if you want to display a link to the users photos from their profile page you could do something like:
One other thing regarding the URL rules in your urlManager, rules are interpreted from top to bottom, and the first matched rule will be used.
Hopefully this helps you on the right path. Check out the following posts if you are still stuck:
http://yiitutorials.net/easy/easy-url-rewriting-with-yii
Yii basic url rewrite