Status: Needs work

Could be useful :) Maybe also display the priorities on thedebug:router command (but on when there are some?)

Something like his has been proposed before in#11753

When using the Route annotation, route ordering is unpredictable, and if you need a route in one controller to be first/last (e.g. as a catch-all route), you can't reliably achieve this.

This is not true. It creates the route in the order the methods are defined. Seehttp://php.net/manual/de/reflectionclass.getmethods.php#115197
So by reordering your controller actions, you can also controll routing priority.
I'm not saying it's the best solution. But I also don't think priorities for routes are much better.
In an ideal scenario, the routing component would either warn you about unreachable routes or even reorder routes automatically when neccessary like in#24748

@Tobion you are right: reordering methods in a single PHP class is simple. However, the problem I sometimes have faced is that I need the routes of some controller to be defined before some other controller. However, with this default config:

controllers:resource:../../src/Controller/type:annotation

Symfony loads controllers alphabetically, so you can't control this in any way ... except importing controllers manually fromroutes.yaml ... and that's really boring. But I don't know if allowing to define priorities would be a better solution.

If we could prevent this from being happening at all, that'd be best IMHO, as this will add complexity.
Can't we say that if you need special ordering like@javiereguiluz says, then you need to switch out from annotations for these routes? That'd be more maintainable on the long run IMHO, both for teaching/doc and core code.

I agree with@nicolas-grekas

@nicolas-grekas: I mean, sure we could treat this as a documentation issue (and I would be willing to work on a doc PR for that if that's the decision), but if the problem is "ordering routes is impractical when using annotations", that's pretty much a "won't fix". That's fine of course if I'm fairly alone in having it, but I'm not sure that's the case.

I might do some kind of informal poll to see if people think this is a real issue that should be solved, or if they don't mind switching to a different route format for routes where order matters.

Possible solutions:

1. Configure each controller individually in theconfig/routes/annotations.yaml file, in the expected order
2. Rename Controller classes to get alphabetical order matching expected order

Moreover, a 3nd solution could be to specify only the highest priority controller in the config before loading the rest:

# config/routes/annotations.yamlfirst_controllers:    resource: ../../src/Controller/VeryFirstController.php    type: annotationall_controllers:    # Loads everything in alphabetical order:  LowerPriorityController, VeryFirstController    resource: ../../src/Controller/    type: annotation

Unfortunately, this solution is not working because the routes defined in theVeryFirstController are loaded twice, and the later remove every route with the same name. When loading a directory, would it be possible to ignore files that have already been loaded?

Instead of adding priorities here, can we do it at the annotations loader one? Could be a new parameter on annotations to control the order in oneAnnotationDirectoryLoader?

@nicolas-grekas: It would help, but I don't think that would solve the issue completely. It would be good to be able to order annotation routes in relation to routes defined in yaml or xml, not just among other annotation routes.

@nicolas-grekas Sure, I'll take a fresh look at it this weekend.

@magnusnordlander friendly ping ;)

Closing in favor of#35608
Thanks for pushing this forward!