Better Way of Adding Listeners - Discussion/Proposal about router5

[troch]

A few questions before trying to give an educated answer:

• What do you use for your view layer?
• What does mountPage(...) do?
• Are your routes flat?

[JonathanWolfe]

• I'm using Riot.JS for my views.
• mountPage is just the method I wrote to unmount the current page and mount the next one.
• No, my routes aren't completely flat

[troch]

The three types of listeners (addListener, addNodeListener, addRouteListener) were designed to be called by components. Because components will appear and disappear during the course of an application runtime, I think it would be confusing to be able to add them when configuring a router. This is especially true for node listeners which are designed to be used to update a view (the other ones are there to help with edge-cases and "side updates" of your view).

My idea is to try to keep router5 as lean as possible, and have it as a base to create more complex systems. My current thought process is to make listeners an optional middleware rather than integrating them further with routes, and have the router only taking care of updating a piece of state.

Another middleware which could be added is to have onActivate / onDeactivate functions (for data loading / unloading purposes). That might be more what you are trying to achieve with something like onNavigate.

So far router5 supports the addition of a single middleware (you obviously compose functions to create a middleware). I am still thinking about what to do and where to go, but I am more looking at decoupling things.

[troch]

Hi @JonathanWolfe, I don't know where you are at with your use of router5 with riot.js. Version 1.0.0 of router5 will be published during the week, it introduces the concept of router plugins where you can trigger operations on start, stop, transition start, transition error, transition success... Each plugin receives the router instance which allows us to decorate it with some methods. This is what router5-listeners does. If you want a specific API to suit riot.js, then you'll then be able to implement it. Multiple middleware functions are also supported with [email protected]

[JonathanWolfe]

Cool. I've got a light load at work so I'll look into it.

[troch]

Router5 v1.0.0 released. Closing this issue for now.