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