How to Pass Extra Information from a Route to a Controller

Parameters inside the defaults collection don’t necessarily have to match a placeholder in the route path. In fact, you can use the defaults array to specify extra parameters that will then be accessible as arguments to your controller:

• YAML

  # app/config/routing.yml
  blog:
      path:      /blog/{page}
      defaults:
          _controller: AppBundle:Blog:index
          page:        1
          title:       "Hello world!"
  

• XML

  <!-- app/config/routing.xml -->
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
  <routes xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/routing"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/routing
          http://symfony.com/schema/routing/routing-1.0.xsd">
  
      <route id="blog" path="/blog/{page}">
          <default key="_controller">AppBundle:Blog:index</default>
          <default key="page">1</default>
          <default key="title">Hello world!</default>
      </route>
  </routes>
  

• PHP

  // app/config/routing.php
  use Symfony\Component\Routing\RouteCollection;
  use Symfony\Component\Routing\Route;
  
  $collection = new RouteCollection();
  $collection->add('blog', new Route('/blog/{page}', array(
      '_controller' => 'AppBundle:Blog:index',
      'page'        => 1,
      'title'       => 'Hello world!',
  )));
  
  return $collection;
  

Now, you can access this extra parameter in your controller:

public function indexAction($page, $title)
{
    // ...
}

As you can see, the $title variable was never defined inside the route path, but you can still access its value from inside your controller.