Lithium routes with different locales

Question

I have a i18n route in Li3 that looks like:

Router::connect('/{:locale:[a-z]{2}/{:args}', [], [
    'continue' => true,
    'persist' => ['locale'],
]);

This way, when a user (or a crawler) enters my site with a language prefix, the locale is used to generate every link on the site.

For SEO purposes, I need to generate URLs in other locales such as:

GET /en/profile/john-doe
Canonical URL: https://www.example.com/en/profile/john-doe
Link hreflang for es: https://www.example.com/es/profile/john-doe
Link hreflang for pt: https://www.example.com/pt/profile/john-doe

My currency approach is cloning the current request, changing the locale, removing locale from the persist array, and using $request->to('url', ['absolute' => true]);.

But I can't get rid of the locale.

Any suggestions on how to address this?

Answer 1

I finally solved it extending HTML helper class:

use lithium\template\helper\Html as BaseHtml;

class Html extends BaseHtml
{
    /**
     * Returns href lang link for a locale for the current request.
     *
     * @param string $locale
     * @return string <link />
     */
    public function getHrefLinkForLocale($locale)
    {
        return $this->link(
            'Canonical URL for ' . $locale,
            compact('locale') + $this->getRequest()->params,
            [
                'absolute' => true,
                'rel' => 'alternate',
                'type' => 'alternate',
                'hreflang' => $locale,
            ]
        );
    }
}