How does EE generate unique URL titles?
Development and Programming
This may be more of a general SQL question, but I figured maybe one of the EE tech guys would have an answer since it deals with EE.
I’m using EE on a fairly advanced custom app and I have come across the need to generate channel entries manually. I know that URL titles need to be unique, and that whenever a new channel entry is created, you need to make sure the URL title is unique (usually by appending a number).
One approach that I’ve thought of – and that works – is to create an array of existing entries, then compare the new entry’s title to each one. If it matches an existing URL title, append a number.
However, this seems really inefficient. I doubt EE does it this way. So…how does EE generate unique URL titles? Can I use something like INSERT IGNORE? Should I make use of the Channel Entries API? (right now I’m doing it manually with PHP).
Thanks!
Hello Ryan,
This is a bit outside of support, but I do appreciate your question.
I would like to move this to Development and Programming, you will get some great insight into this and there will be a lot more eyes on the question.
Does that sound good?
Cheers,
Sounds great, thanks.
EE uses url helper to generate URL title. As you know it checks if that url_title is already taken by creating new url_title with appending a number.
it would be best way to use Channel Entries API for new entries.
Thanks Bhashkar. Since I’ve posted I’ve had some time to tinker with the Channel Entries API and it’s much, much cleaner than the manual stuff I was doing before. I don’t have to worry about duplicating URL titles and I can use less code.
Much appreciated!