@axtk/router

Core ideas:

• The route navigation interface might be similar to window.location (route.href, route.assign(), route.replace()).
• Routes might be handled as arbitrary plain strings, with their nestedness being irrelevant.
• Regular expressions might be sufficient to express pattern-wise route matching (especially with the advent of the named capturing groups) instead of pattern strings, reserving fixed strings for exact route matching.

Usage

Initialization

// route.js
import {Route} from '@axtk/router';
export const route = new Route();

Subscription to URL changes

Adding a handler of an exact URL path:

import {route} from './route';

let routeListener = route.addListener('/home', ({href}) => {
    console.log(href);
});

of a specific URL path pattern:

route.addListener(/^\/section\/(?<id>\d+)\/?$/, ({href, params}) => {
    console.log(href, params.id);
});

and removing a previously created route listener:

routeListener.remove();

Tracking all route changes:

let unsubscribe = route.onChange(({href}) => {
    console.log(href);
});

and unsubscribing from them:

unsubscribe();

Matching

Checking a route pattern (or an array thereof) if it matches the current path:

// Provided that the current location is '/section/42':
route.match('/home'); // null
route.match('/section/42'); // {}
route.match(/^\/section\/(?<id>\d+)\/?$/); // {0: '42', id: '42'}

Navigation

Getting the current location:

console.log(route.href);

Changing the current location:

// With the current location saved in the browser history
route.assign('/home');

// Without saving the current location in the browser history
route.replace('/home');

Reloading the current location (by re-dispatching the current location event to the subscribers of route):

route.reload();

Jumping to browser history entries:

route.go(-2); // to go 2 entries back in the browser history
route.back(); // = route.go(-1);
route.forward(); // = route.go(+1);

Modifying the behavior

The interaction of a Route instance with window.history or window.location is isolated in a couple of methods that can be overriden in descendant classes to apply custom routing behavior. These methods are: init, transition, go, calcHref.

For example: by default, a Route instance takes into account changes in the pathname, search, and hash portions of the URL combined. To make a Route instance disregard the URL search and hash, the Route class can be extended to redefine the calcHref method:

import {Route, getPath} from '@axtk/router';

export class PathRoute extends Route {
    calcHref(location) {
        return getPath(location, {search: false, hash: false});
    }
}

Also

• @axtk/react-router, an extension of router with React hooks