kishorenc/road

Route helper for Express

road's Issues

Pass req, res objects separately

The controller methods current take conn as the first parameter. To access req and res we need to do conn.req and conn.res.

No idea how I ended up dong this. Pass reqand res as separate parameters. New method signature will look this way:

controllerMethod(req, res, callback)

Default routes should be internalized

Instead of making routes.js mandatory, it should be made optional, road should work with default route of /:controller?/:action?/:id? automatically.

Add support for redirection

Something along the lines of callback('redirect', 'url') will be nice.

Callback

Would be useful to have a callback(err, next) which road will call when it's done.

View callbacks look messy

The callback of the controller method is used to render the view. It offers lots of options, but ends up looking unwieldy at times. Also, does not follow node's convention of (err, data).

Example:

callback(['viewName', {key:'value'}], 'text/plain');

Redesigned callbacks should look like:

// render view with data (optional) and MIME type (optional)
callback(err, 'viewName', {key: 'value'}, 'text/plain');   

// render view with just data and MIME type
callback(err, 'viewName`, 'text/plain');                       

// render plain text string in custom MIME type 
callback(err, {'text/plain': 'plain text string'});              

Controller names should begin with a capital letter?

i.e. NOT bookController - should be BookController?

I am not sure about the convention, something to think about.

Handle errors

Errors should be passed down the stack using next(err).

Fire next(err) only if there is err

In handleCallback().

Set status property on Error()

Road currently passes any error encountered (or passed from controller) down stack. Useful to add a status property to error object to indicate type of error - this can be used to render the correct HTTP status code by the downstream error handling function.

E.g. if controller is not found, set error.status = 404, for other errors prob set status to 500.

JSON render support for callback

Currently, to render JSON through the callback, need to do something like this:

var jsonMsg = JSON.stringify({
    code : -4,
message : response
});

return callback(null, {'text/plain': jsonMsg});

Verbose. Make it do something like:

callback(null, {'json': {foo: 'bar'}});

Generators for creating controllers/views

Generators for quickly creating stub controllers and corresponding view folders from the command line.