v6 uninline child

[thejuan]

Playing with the v6 branch. It'd be nice if you could something like

const detailsRoutes = PRODUCT.DETAILS.uninline(PRODUCT).

So you could then use inline children to get the easy dot notation access, but break it apart when creating routes.

[thejuan]

Or even

const details = useRelativeRoutes(PRODUCT.DETAILS) and it uses current location information to break it apart.

[fenok]

Hello and thanks for your interest in the library!

I thought about providing a way to extract/uninline a child route, but eventually, I settled on the idea that it should be done during routes definition:

const DETAILS = route("details");

const PRODUCT = route("product/:id", {}, { DETAILS });

const ROUTE_PARTS = {
  DETAILS
}

const ROUTES = {
  PRODUCT
}

This way, we explicitly allow DETAILS to be used independently, and we can also use PRODUCT.DETAILS.

What I considered:

• Providing a field with the original route, say PRODUCT.DETAILS.uninline === DETAILS. Dismissed as an API overcomplication, because it's easy to extract the route beforehand and get the same result.
• Providing originalPath and originalRelativePath fields (only for using in a <Route /> path prop!), e.g. PRODUCT.DETAILS.originalPath === '/details' and PRODUCT.DETAILS.originalRelativePath === 'details'. Dismissed as an API overcomplication, because there are already path and relativePath fields, and the combination of these fileds would be extremely confusing. It's also safer to pass an entire absolute path to the path prop, because this way it's impossible to create an unexpected path (in case of <Route/> nesting). However, there are edge cases when you do need to extract children, as written in the README.

Regarding your suggestions:

• const details = useRelativeRoutes(PRODUCT.DETAILS) can't be statically typed, because it uses current location information, so it's most likely a no-go.
• const detailsRoutes = PRODUCT.DETAILS.uninline(PRODUCT) - do I understand correctly that it's basically the same as my PRODUCT.DETAILS.uninline, but you can specify which part to drop? Like PRODUCT.DETAILS.SUB_DETAILS.uninline(PRODUCT) === DETAILS.SUB_DETAILS? If so, you can extract children beforehand, as I mentioned earlier, and get basically the same result. Note that you most likely don't need extracted children when you define your <Route/>s, and when you build URLs, it's also safer to stick to absolute URLs.

Please let me know if I misunderstood something.

[thejuan]

Our use case is mainly to allow relative Navigate to redirect default paths without having to know parameters to use .buildPath inside a Routes I have currently written a helper to do it relativeFrom Maybe there is a better way to achieve this?

  <Route path={roleLocations.Definition.Instance.path} element={<RoleDefinitionWizard />}>
                  <Route path={Basics.path} element={<RoleBasicsView />}>
                    <Route path={Basics.Title.path} element={<RoleBasicsTitleView />} />
                   ...
                    <Route path="" element={<Navigate replace to={relativePathFrom(Basics, Basics.Title)} />} />
                  </Route>

Defining everything as un-inlined looses alot of meaning. i.e. What is the route Title? Maybe it belongs to many parents, then we end up naming them BasicsTitle

This helper solves my problem, so maybe its not needed as part of the API

[fenok]

Oh, now I understand what you want. Unfortunately, at the moment the only way to achieve that is to extract the child route beforehand and call .buildRelativeUrl() (or .buildRelativePath()) on it.

It would look like this:

<Route path={roleLocations.Definition.Instance.path} element={<RoleDefinitionWizard />}>
  <Route path={roleLocations.Definition.Instance.Basics.path} element={<RoleBasicsView />}>
    <Route path={roleLocations.Definition.Instance.Basics.Title.path} element={<RoleBasicsTitleView />} />
    <Route index element={<Navigate replace to={Title.buildRelativeUrl({})} />} />
  </Route>
</Route>

Note that, in your snippet, Basics has to be equal to roleLocations.Definition.Instance.Basics (because you use absolute .path field), so I just wrote it explicitly. I also used index instead of path="", because, AFAIK, it's the intended way to define such routes.

I would advise against using relativeFrom, because it's not type-safe (what if Title had a path parameter?).

Defining everything as un-inlined looses alot of meaning

I totally agree! I thought that uninlining child routes is a relatively rare use-case, but now I see that I might be wrong. I can't think of a convenient and comprehensive API for this, though.

Sorry for the late response 😅

[fenok]

I mean, PRODUCT.DETAILS.SUB_DETAILS.WHATEVER.uninline(PRODUCT.DETAILS) === SUB_DETAILS.WHATEVER is comprehensive and probably doable, but is it really convenient?

[fenok]

Ok, I think I got this. I published a new version under next tag which includes API for children uninlining. It can be used like this:

<Route path={roleLocations.Definition.Instance.path} element={<RoleDefinitionWizard />}>
  <Route path={roleLocations.Definition.Instance.Basics.path} element={<RoleBasicsView />}>
    <Route path={roleLocations.Definition.Instance.Basics.Title.path} element={<RoleBasicsTitleView />} />
    <Route index element={<Navigate replace to={roleLocations.Definition.Instance.Basics.$.Title.buildRelativeUrl({})} />} />
  </Route>
</Route>

The mental model here is that $ cuts everything at the left side, and we get just Title as if it was uninlined.

Internally, $ just contains original child routes, so it was very easy to implement 😅

[thejuan]

Amazing! Thankyou