Geppetto and Routing

[mtsr]

Hey,

So while I'm working on a prototype using Geppetto, I'm playing around with a clean way to do routing and everything that goes with it. Some thoughts:

• only commands create / modify collections and models. Models themselves only generate events, they don't handle events (except possible of submodels, subcollections, etc);
• collections and models live on the context. Views listen/bind to models on the context and dispatch commands that change them;
• views should not be called directly, but they do subscribe to context events;
• as little boilerplate as possible in Views, Models;
• Sub-contexts that are used by somewhat independent modular sub-views should be able to have their own routing;

Right now I have the following:

• Where possible routes are called with simple links. All links are handled in appLayout using 'click a:not([data-bypass])': 'linkClicked',, although they ofcourse can be captured and suppressed deeper in the DOM, if necessary;
• linkClicked dispatches a navigate command on the context;
• the navigate command currently only calls context.router.route() and that's it;
• the router (one per context, backbone handles registering their routes with Backbone.History) knows what commands go with what routes and dispatches the correct command;
• The specific command sets up required collections and models on the context and triggers an event that tells appLayout to show a specific view.

It feels a little convoluted, so it may need simplification. On the other hand I'd like it the solution to be generic enough that I can use it in a variety of situations. (I could put some of this in a gist to show how it works exactly, if helpful).

A related issue I'm running into is updating the models for for example my menu items in reaction to a route event from the backbone router. It's difficult to make this generic since only parameters are passed on by the router, but the actual fragment is not. So it's not easy to have one function handle all route events.

[mtsr]

I made some changes to backbone routing, having it pass the fragment and route to the callbacks and eventlisteners. Also adding named parameters in the most generic possible way, by adding them to regular expression routes using XRegExp. I guess it would be possible to expand the backbone specific syntax a bit with this, but I like regular expressions, so meh.

But with these changes, the route specific commands actually work really well, since they now get an object with all the route parameters, the fragment and the route.

The only doubt I have at the moment is whether the NavigateCommand is necessary, as it still doesn't do anything much. But I guess I prefer commands to be the only one to touch the context (and like models, the router lives on the context in my app).

[mtsr]

I'd still be interested in feedback from other users, but my problem is solved for now, so I'm closing the issue.