jquery-atomic-nav

Concise jQuery routing and navigation plugin based on nested navigation states.

This library is designed to work with component-based application UIs. Heavily inspired by the state-machine approach of AngularJS UI Router and modern techniques like Promises that emphasize immutable, functional state.

Unlike AngularJS UI Router and most other routing libraries, Atomic Nav routes are defined on-demand. This allows for a better, more elegant composition of widgets with no need for the massive central "routes" file.

Usage

Routes are defined via when method. Each route body is executed when a navigation state is entered. The navigation state can be used to define nested routes, and to track when the user leaves that navigation state. The library defines the "root" navigation state that is always active - that is the starting place where routes are registered.

To detect when a navigation state is no longer active, register a callback on the state object using the whenDestroyed.then method. The whenDestroyed property is a full-fledged promise object, so the callback will be called even when trying to register after the user left the navigation state. This is helpful to easily clean up UI created as a result of an asynchronous operation: the operation may complete after the navigation state has become inactive, so attaching a simple event listener would miss out on the cleanup.

Examples

For more examples see /example/index.html.

Example code:

var rootNav = $.navigationRoot();

rootNav.when('/foo', function (fooNav) {
    console.log('entered "foo" state');

    // e.g. create a container widget

    fooNav.whenDestroyed.then(function() {
        console.log('left "foo" state');

        // e.g. destroy the container widget
    });

    fooNav.when('/bar', function (barNav) {
        console.log('entered "foo/bar" state');

        // e.g. create a sub-widget and attach to container

        barNav.whenDestroyed.then(function() {
            console.log('left "foo/bar" state');

            // e.g. destroy the sub-widget
        });
    });
});

rootNav.when('/baz/:someParam', function (someParam, bazNav) {
    console.log('entered "baz" state with "' + someParam + '"');

    bazNav.whenDestroyed.then(function() {
        console.log('left "baz" state with "' + someParam + '"');
    });
});

Composition example:

// top-level "page" view
function RootView() {
    var rootNav = $.navigationRoot();
    var $dom = $('body');

    rootNav.when('/fizz-buzz', function (fizzBuzzNav) {
        var fizzBuzzView = new FizzBuzzView($dom, fizzBuzzNav);
    });
}

// sub-component in another file
function FizzBuzzView($dom, nav) {
    // ... render DOM, etc

    // can create sub-routes without needing to know what the URL is
    nav.when('/foo-bar', function (fooBarNav) {
        // render more sub-route DOM, etc
    });
}