Routing

Kikwit supports both explicit and implicit routing.

Explicit routing

Explicit routing is when a controller or action is tagged with a @route decorator.

import { controller, get, route } from 'kikwit';
@route('/prods')
@controller
export class Products {
    @route('/catalog')
    @get
    list(context) {
        ...
    }
}

In the example above, the list action will be accessible at /prods/catalog.

Implicit routing

Implicit routing is when a controller or action is not tagged with a @route decorator.

import { controller, get } from 'kikwit';
@controller
export class Products {
    @get
    list(context) {
        ...
    }
}

In the example above, the list action will be accessible at /products/list.

Route parameters

Routes can define dynamic parts in the following format :KEY where KEY is the key used to access the corresponding value from the request context.

import { controller } from 'kikwit';
@controller
export class Products {
    @route('/show/:id')
    @get
    details(context) {
        context.send(context.params.id);
    }
}

With the route above, a GET /products/show/34 request will result in a context params's id of 34.

Route parameters can use regular expressions as constraints in the following format :KEY<REGEX> where REGEX is the regular expression constraint.

Using the example above, if the request was GET /products/show/laptop then the context.params.id would be laptop. But if the action route was

@route('/show/:id<\\d+>') instead then GET /products/show/laptop request would not be dispatched to the details action.

Route parameters can also be specified on the controller level route decorator.

Route names

Action routes can specify a route name which helps generate URLs targeting the route.

import { controller } from 'kikwit';
@controller
export class Products {
    @route('/show/:id', 'productDetails')
    @get
    details(context) {
        context.send(context.params.id);
    }
}

The context's routeURL(name [, params] [, query] [, validate = true]) method can be called to generate the URL.

i.e. a link to the details action's route can be generated using the following

context.routeURL('productDetails', { id: 34 })

The above would generate the string /products/show/34.

Query strings can be added to the generated URL with the help of the third argument of the context's routeURL(...) method.

context.routeURL('productDetails', { id: 34 }, { offset: 10, pageSize: 20})

The above would generate the string /products/show/34?offset=10&pageSize=20.

The validate argument validates params values against route constraints (if any). Passing false skips any validation.