Use page id in Pages.as (instead of page route)

I work for an international company and most of the time I make non-English websites. So the "title" and "route" attribute will be non English as well. But the code must always be English. Therefor we use English id's for all pages. When I scaffold the project, Gaia uses the route, and not the id, so all values in Pages.as are non English.

I think the page id's should also be unique and can therefor be used in the Pages.as.

While commemorating Steven for the awesome, awesome work on Gaia, I second the request for using page id's in Pages.as instead of the page title when scaffolding.

I understand using the route (or title) instead of the ID is because the id is NOT unique after all. You can have the same ID name as long as they're not siblings. I use the same id within the site.xml a lot.

using the full branch id (separated by underscore or dash) would be a solution, but would not be that easy to read. I recommend renaming the constants to meaningful names and keeping a copy of it if going to scaffold again, or use a different class instead of Pages.as, and update it if you add pages to the site.xml.

I change the site.xml a few times during most projects, so I use a copied class from Pages.as named Routes.as, with meaningful names, and update it when scaffolding again. The actual naming of the class has a little extra advantage with flashdevelop: If start typing "pages" (without the uppercase P) it gives me the autocomplete for the pages package and no the Pages.as. With Routes (or anything different than Pages) I don't have this annoyance

Route isn't unique either. You can reuse the same route without getting an error in Gaia.

Since id is shorten for 'identifier' I think it should be unique. Like it is in other languages like HTML.

A route should be unique, never the less. If not unique, you wouldn't be able to deeplink to a duplicated route-name page.
On the other hand, the id doesn't need to be unique.

Routes are always unique. It is impossible to have a duplicate route. If you give two pages the same route, the latter page will overwrite the previous one.

Page ids are not unique. Branches are the only true unique identifier since you cannot have two siblings with the same id.

This topic has been discusssed numerous times on the forum. It's not a change that I'm going to make because it's not a change that makes sense.

If routes should be unique I think Gaia should throw an Error (or at least display a warning) when you use duplicates. Now it is possible to use the same route for different pages.

No it isn't possible, nor is it logical.

If you have an expectation that one route could take you to two different locations, you haven't got a very good grasp of the universe and should either check into a mental hospital or become a scientist exploring alternate universes where the rules of our universe don't apply.

I'm not going to throw an error that says "One route cannot lead to two places" anymore than I would throw an error that says "Your mother cannot be your sister."

And for the record, choosing ids vs titles vs routes to use in the Pages class is somewhat arbitrary. The bottom line is the pages class is merely a convenient substitute for branches. Since ids are not unique, and as much as I have tried to encourage not duplicating ids, people still do it pretty often, they are not an acceptable shortcut. Titles tend to be more descriptive than routes, so I chose titles as the const names since it makes them more easily identifiable, which is the *only* purpose of the Pages class.

Displaying a warning should really be helpful. If you work on a big project with a large site.xml with multiple developers it's hard to see if a route is already taken by a page. You get unexpected bugs since deeplinking works incorrect.

You only need to add something like:

if(_routes.hasOwnProperty(page.route)
{
   GaiaDebug.warn("Duplicate rout '" + page.route + "'");

}

Inside SiteModel.as (line 262)

This is also very handy if you didn't use routes and the title is used as route (title can be used multiple times).

I could also argue about the mother / sister  thing. But that would be a complete different discussion I think 

There's no simple solution to this. Some people use identical titles, some don't. Some people use identical ids, some don't. IMO, titles are more likely to be unique than ids, but YMMV. No matter, what, though, routes are under your total control and you always have the ability to modify the Pages.as file to suit your needs.

I have switched to using ids.

Great!