How to organize the output of nested categories and posts?

Question

Yii

Good afternoon.
Given: Nested categories, categories have entries. How to organize output of nested categories and the record itself
For example:
catalog/cat1/cat2/cat3/ is a category of the 3rd level
catalog/cat12/cat22/item2 is already a record
catalog/cat21/item3 is also a record.
So far, I decided by checking in the catalogController controller with url parsing whether the final path is a section or an element. But I don't feel right. Maybe there is a nice solution?
Thank you.