modules-and-lumbar.md

Modules and lumbar.json

A Lumbar module is composed of routes (to be passed to Backbone.Routers), stylesheets and JavaScripts. When a route is visited the scripts and styles associated with the module will be loaded. After running the generate:view task your lumbar.json should look like this:

{
  "mixins": [
    "node_modules/lumbar-loader",
    "node_modules/thorax",
    "config/base.json"
  ],
  "modules": {
    "todos": {
      "routes": {},
      "scripts": [
        "js/routers/todos.js",
        "js/views/todos/index.js"
      ],
      "styles": [
        "stylesheets/todos.css"
      ]
    }
  },
  "templates": {
    "js/init.js": [
      "templates/application.handlebars"
    ]
  }
}

mixins loads up the base configurations for the project. To edit what libraries (jQuery / Bootstrap, etc) are included in the project open up bower.json. The templates hash defines what templates map to a given view. An entry only needs to be added if the name of a view doesn't match the name of a template. For instance, the generator created js/views/todos/index.js and templates/todos/index.js, but it doesn't need to be defined here as the names match.

Since all routes are specified in lumbar.json, to create our first route it needs to be added there so we will create an empty (root) route pointing at an index method:

"modules": {
  "todos": {
    "routes": {
      "": "index"
    },
    ...

In js/routers/todos.js we will then implement the method:

new (Backbone.Router.extend({
  routes: module.routes,
  index: function() {

  }
}));

Note that module.routes is automatically made available and will contain the hash of routes specified in lumbar.json for the todos module.

Now learn about Application and Views