Difference between an Id and frontName in routes.xml

While declaring the routes you must have added route id and frontName. In most cases, we use the same name for both. Why not use a different name? What is the difference between an id and the frontName inside routes.xml.

routes.xml

The routes.xml file is an important file that routes HTTP requests to the appropriate controller inside Magento. When we write either a frontend or admin controllers that time we need to declare the routes.xml file under the etc/frontend, etc/adminhtml directory of the module which has controllers. The only difference between an admin request and a frontend request is the router id. In the case of admin it is “admin” and for frontend it is “standard“

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:App/etc/routes.xsd">
    <router id="admin">
        <route id="learning_magento" frontName="learning_magento">
            <module name="LearningMagento_Routings" />
        </route>
    </router>
</config>

You can also look how we can override a controller in Magento. Overriding a controller doesn’t require routes.xml file.

config element

The <config> element is the root element in the xml file. The attribute xmlns:xsi must always have a value as http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance which defines as namespace and xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation will have "urn:magento:framework:App/etc/routes.xsd which is the schema location.

router element

As mentioned above this element has an id as an attribute it will always have two values admin and standard. If you place a router id as admin in etc/frontend and standard in etc/adminhtml then it won’t work. The standard one is for the front end and admin is for the back end. The above example is of the Admin route.

route element

This is the main part we are here to see. The difference between id and frontName. It has 3 attributes id, frontName and disabled.

id attribute

The id attribute should be unique from other routes. It is used by Magento to identify and match incoming requests.

frontName

The frontName attribute specifies the URL segment that appears before the action name in the URL structure.

disabled

Both of the above two attributes are mandatory for the element apart from these two there is an optional attribute disabled, which is used to disable the route.

Difference between id and frontName

The key difference between id and frontName is that it is used for internal module identification in the routing system where as the frontName is used determine the URL path prefix for accessing the controller.

 <route id="learningmagento" frontName="magentolearn">

Let’s discuss with an example using the above route. A controller class is defined under Controller/Learn/Routing.php. To access this route it will the frontName and not the id. If you enter the URL of the website followed by the route id and the controller path then you will be redirected to a 404 page (learningmagento/learn/routing). This is because the id is not used for accessing the path.

The correct way would be to use frontName as the route and the path to the controller. magentolearn/learn/routing this way the controller will be hit.

module element

This element has only one attribute which is the name and it should be the module name. In our case it was LearningMagento_Routings.