Advanced 404 Handling?

[eluser]dmorin[/eluser]
Advanced 404 Handling?

I have a situation where I want to be able to create urls with random text where the controller class name is usually. For example, http://example.com/random_text. The random text would translate back to IDs I have stored into my database, where I would figure out what kind of an ID it is and redirect to the correct url. It's basically a convenience and url shortening approach.

At first, I thought I could use routes, but the text could be different lengths so I instead through extending the 404 handler in the exceptions class but that sounds messy. If there was only a pre_404 hook!

Has anyone done something similar and if so, any advice/guidance? Thanks.