routesmith

RouteSmith

RouteSmith is a simple routing solution for Express-based apps. It creates routes based off of a list of objects rather than a file structure, allowing you to quickly generate robust routes with easily-assigned controllers, middleware, and parameters.

Installation

$ npm install --save routesmith

Packages

RouteSmith-Sequelize allows developers to easily create controllers to go along with RouteSmith's routes.

$ npm install --save routesmith-sequelize

Usage

const express = require('express');
const router = express.Router();
const routes = require('./routes.js'); // Require your own routes file here.

const rs = require('routesmith');
router.use('/', rs.Initialize(routes)); // Initialize RouteSmith with your route data.

Route Data

RouteSmith requires an array of JSON objects containing specific information to be defined in order to generate routes.

Path

The path field determines the URL of the endpoints to be generated.

ID

The id field determines the name to be used for the URL parameter (e.g. /users/:userID).

Controllers

Controllers are expected to be objects with create, get, getAll, update, and remove methods, corresponding to basic CRUD operations.

Middleware

Middleware methods can be inserted via the middleware array. Middleware is applied to children of each routes - that is, if you have middleware to check for editing permission on one route, that middleware will also check for permissions on all requests to children of that route.

Children

The children array contains a list of other routes to be created under the original route.

Child routes do have one additional field in the data object: belongsTo. This is used to identify a parent route's id for use in the controller, since oftentimes routes describe relationships between models in a database (for example, all posts on a forum would belong to users based on the users' IDs).

Example Routes

const routes = [
	{
		path:'users',
		id:'userID',
		controller:<controller object goes here>,
		middleware:[
			<middleware objects go here>
		],
		children:[
			{
				path:'posts',
				id:'postID',
				controller:<controller object goes here>,
				middleware:[
					<middleware objects go here>
				]
			}
		]
	}
]

If we wished to simplify the route structure further, we could strip out unnecessary data (for example, if we had no middleware to apply).

const routes = [
	{
		path:'users',
		id:'userID',
		controller:<controller object goes here>
		children:[
			{
				path:'posts',
				id:'postID',
				controller:<controller object goes here>
			}
		]
	}
]

Based on this structure, we would have the following routes:

/users
/users/:userID
/users/:userID/posts
/users/:userID/posts/:postID