JavaScript Routes

right now the crossroads.routed dispatches on any match even if multiple parse() for same value are called in a row, I'm wondering what would be the correct behavior... Right now I think the correct behavior would be to only dispatch routed if it actually matched a different route than previous time, another option is to create a separate signal with the different behavior (maybe a matched or switched signal).

The Problem

When there are a series of multiple optional parameters in a route, like these:

/used-cars/:year:/:make:/:model:
/recipes/:search-term:/:with-ingredients:

Crossroads cannot treat these optional parameters as fully independent, otherwise routes would be ambiguous. For the first route, constraints on what year, make and model could be possible, but in the 2nd it is not as the domains of their values overlap

The Solution

Create optional parameters that also match an identifier so that it can disambiguate exactly what the value is intended to map to. So the previous routes can be written like

/used-cars/|year|/|make|/|model|
/recipes/|search-term|/|with-ingredients|

and will match routes like:

/used-cars/make/ford
/used-cars/year/2005
/used-cars/make/toyota/model/tundra
/recipes/with-ingredients/cheddar
/recipes/search-term/pasta/with-ingredients/cheddar

This scenario is quite common in when building a filter upon a resource.

I also cleaned up parse.spec.js a bit as some of the tests could have resulted in false positives if the matching signal callback was called twice, and the first was wrong but the 2nd call was correct.

right now crossroads.js is flexible enough to change the data format but still requires some repetitive work to parse query strings...

see: https://github.com/auchenberg/crossroads.js/commit/89fb9c14931d052c25b3a6a34dfe0503709e71cf for more info

still unsure how it should be implemented since in some cases the query string may need to be considered as part of a path segment...

The second call to setHash throws an error:

crossroads.addRoute( 'lorem/{id}', function( id ) { alert( id ); } );

hasher.changed.add( crossroads.parse, crossroads );
hasher.init();

hasher.setHash('lorem/123');  // works with alert(123)
hasher.setHash('lorem/456');  // javascript error

the issue #49 made me think about it:

1. should routes also be case insensitive? so the route foo/bar would be the same as Foo/BAR.
2. should crossroads always pass values as lowercase to listeners? (this might cause issues with the query string feature and may be undesirable)

PS: for now I will implement it as a branch but not merge it into master..

Basically it wanted to use crossroads to write something like this.

todosRoute = crossroads.addRoute('/todos', showStats)
todosRoute.addRoute('', showAllTasks)
todosRoute.addRoute('/{id}', showSingleTask)

This matches both /todos and /todos/3. In the first case it shows all tasks, and in the latter it shows only the task with id 3. Additionally it shows the stats in both cases.

Everything nested routes can do should be specified in nested.spec.js. I will also add documentation.

This is a question, not a bug.

What is the standard for routing on page load? If I type .com/about/ , I'd like to be routed to .com/#!/about/.

I've got this working on link click by parsing the href, but I'm not sure about how to do this on page load. Does this need to be configured at the server level?

I noticed if you define a rule that is an array of acceptable values on a route, the matching algorithim in crossroads does a case sensitive match against the the acceptable values. Is this the expected behavior? I would assume such a match would be case insensitive. It also doesn't mention anything about case sensitivity in your documentation.

var route = crossroads.addRoute("/{controller}/:action:", function(controller, action) {
    // do stuff...
});

router.rules = {
    controller: ["testcontroller"]
}

crossroads.parse("/TestController/action");

Thanks for writing this library. It's been a great help!

Bypassed action is called each time crossroads can't match any route. Crossroads passes requestString parameter to the action and I can't do anything except logging. Is there any ability to send 404 or close connection? I think it would be great to have response and request objects available in the "bypassed" action.

{controller}/{action}/{id?} - ? sign marks the id parameter as optional. {controller}/{action}/{id*} - * implies that the id parameter can contain the rest of the path (all symbols including /)

Hi,

Your lib is quite good, I have a feature-request: I think it will be cool to create method crossroads.create({ name: "ROUTE_NAME", params: { userId: 4 } }) --> this should call crossroads.parse(CREATED_LOCATION);

What do you think about this?

I'm using the lib and an insight came up, is there any way to add events before and after a route is dispatched?

I didn't find in the examples how to do this, do you think it's a good idea to implement this feature?

Hi! I'm trying to start using crossroads. I've managed to get "/" route working but for some reason others (/account) wont work. Could you help a noobie out of this? `

  var defaultRoute = crossroads.addRoute("/", function () {

    $("#root").load("main.html");

  });

  var accountRoute = crossroads.addRoute("account", function () {

    $("#root").load("account.html");

  });
  crossroads.parse(document.location.pathname);

`

I'm getting on url localhost:8000/ all working as I want to but on localhost:8000/account it gives 404... :(

Hi, (sorry for my English) I've this code: route ('/{index}' ,'index-page','../views/index', { index:['','home'] })

it return to me a obj valid to register routes, and work fine, but, if i add a empty url { index:["","home"] } the #home works, but the first index not, because its empty. So how can i add a empty value for my home page? I did not want create a new route for solve this problem... i trying add '/' , '#' but it does not work as it should.

Obs.: i use some like this ':rest*:', "404", "../views/notFound/on404" to not found page and all my routes works

thanks for attention (REALLY sorry for my English haha)

Route in form of:

/{foo}{?query}
/{foo}:?query:

Would end up being interpolated as /foo/?params which is unexpected to happen because trailing slash carries meaning for REST servers.