casualuser/meteor-router

Meteor Router

The Meteor Router builds on page.js to build a reactive, filtering router for Meteor apps.

Router API

Basics

To find the current page:

Meteor.Router.page();

This is a reactive variable which will trigger invalidations as the app changes pages. Usually, you'll just want to render the template that corresponds to the current page:

<!-- this will render the 'news' template in the current example -->
{{renderPage}}

To define a route, simply specify the URL it matches and the name of the template it should render. If you want to get fancy, you can specify a reactive function that returns a template name. It will get repeatedly executed as its reactive dependencies change.

Meteor.Router.add({
  '/news': 'news',
  
  '/about': function() {
    if (Session.get('aboutUs')) {
      return 'aboutUs';
    } else {
      return 'aboutThem';
    }
  }
});

To navigate to such a URL from in the app, either create a link which links to the URL (the router will intercept clicks and trigger relevant state changes), or call directly:

Meteor.Router.to('/news');

Note that this doesn't reload the app, it instead uses HTML5 pushState to change the URL whilst remaining loaded.

Route Matches

When the route function is called, this corresponds to a page.js Context, allowing you to do the following:

Meteor.Router.add({
  'posts/:id': function(id) {
     console.log('we are at ' + this.canonicalPath);
     console.log("our parameters: " + this.params);

     // access parameters in order a function args too
     Session.set('currentPostId', id);
     return 'showPost';
  }
});

Filtering

The current system of filtering in this package is the equivalent of an after_filter in Rails. To add a filter which will render the correct template for a page which requires login:

Meteor.Router.filters({
  'checkLoggedIn': function(page) {
    if (Meteor.user()) {
      if (Meteor.user().loading) {
        return 'loading';
      } else {
        return page;
      }
    } else {
      return 'signin';
    }
  }
});

To turn the filter on, use one of:

// applies to all pages
Meteor.Router.filter('checkLoggedIn');

// applies to specific pages
Meteor.Router.filter('checkLoggedIn', {only: 'profile'});
Meteor.Router.filter('checkLoggedIn', {except: 'home'});

// accepts an array of pages
Meteor.Router.filter('checkLoggedIn', {only: ['profile', 'notifications'] });
Meteor.Router.filter('checkLoggedIn', {except: ['home', 'browse'] });

Note that filters build on reactivity. So the URL will not change but the user will see different pages as the state of the Meteor.user() property changes.

Server Side Routing

The router also allows a very simple server side routing function with a similar API:

Meteor.Router.add('/posts/:id.xml', function(id) {
  return constructXMLForId(Posts.findOne(id));
});

The arguments to the routing function are the parameters you've specified in your URL, and the this within the function is an object with three properties:

• this.params -- the list of parameters, page.js style
• this.request -- a connect request
• this.response -- a connect response (use this to e.g. set headers on your response).

Your routing function can return one of the following:

• a string, the body of the response
• a number, the http status code
• an array, consisting of one of:
  • [body]
  • [statusCode, body]
  • [statusCode, headers, body]

headers should be an hash of header name -> value.

Alternatively, rather than a routing function, you can just provide a fixed response:

Meteor.Router.add('/404', [404, "There's nothing here!"]);

NOTE: Spark (meteor's template engine) does not currently run server side, so you are limited in what you can return here. Most likely you will want to return fairly simple things like JSON or XML documents, the construction of which is up to you.

###Examples

Check out examples/simple-routed-app for an extremely simple example of a filtered routed app. (To run, use meteorite: cd examples/simple-routed-app; mrt run).

Additionally, you might want to read my blog post about transitions in Meteor.

###Installing

Use meteorite:

Then add via:

mrt add router

###Contributing

To run the tests, ensure that the router is checked out to a folder called router, and then simply run

mrt