connect-dispatcher

Disclaimer. connect-dispatcher is outdated. See koajs, rest, react-router or other frameworks.

Why?

1. Conventions over configurations. DRY routes.
2. It has to be simple. A controller returns data to a views, rendering the different type of views depend on the context. You can process the first response on the server-side, then render the same view in the browser.
3. Caching controllers, views, or the entire html. Cache stored in a memory, but there is no a big deal about moving to Redis.
4. Small size footprint, just single file src/dispatcher.js written with typed Flow ES6.

For more information see examples and tests.

Getting started

First, install packages via npm:

npm install connect-dispatcher

Second, create a new file app.js:

var app = require('connect')(),
  dispatcher = require('connect-dispatcher');

app.use(dispatcher());

app.listen(3001);

By default the connect-dispatcher trying to look for controller with the name app/controllers/pages_controller.js whithing exported method index. So to avoid 404 error we need as simple controller as this pages_controller.js:

var pages = module.exports;

pages.index = function () {
  return this.asText('Hello World!');
};

It produces simple plain-text response to the browser, without view rendering. To enable template-engine rendering, change code to:

var pages = module.exports;

pages.index = function () {
  return {
    title:'Hello World!'
  };
};

and add to project a jade template. By default, the location of this view is app/views/pages/index.jade

h1= title

After server is restarted, refresh the browser to see html response (if you are not using livereload):

<h1> Hello World! </h1>

Options

Full config example:

app.use(dispatcher({
  routes: { '/' : '/pages/home'},
  controllersPath:  'application/controllers',
  getControllerFile: function (name) { return name + '_controller.js';},
  viewsPath: 'application/views', // by default it depends on NODE_ENV (useful for grunt usemin)
  getViewFile: function (controller, action) { return controller + '/' + action + '.jade';}
  cache : true, // by default it depends on NODE_ENV
  renderHook: function (ctx) { console.log ('before render ' + ctx.request.controller + '/' + ctx.request.action)}

}))

TODO

-[] DI; -[] Remove all dependencies;