RouterMiddleware

This guide will show you how to create routes for handling HTTP requests using the RouterMiddleware.

There are three ways in which you can define your routes. The easiest is by using the methods get, post, etc. from the org.jogger.RouterMiddleware class:

    RouterMiddleware router = new RouterMiddleware();
    router.get("/", new RouteHandler() {
        @Override
        public void handle(Request request, Response response) throws Exception {
            // do something here
        }
    });

    Jogger jogger = new Jogger(router);
    jogger.listen();

Every time we receive GET request to / it will call the RouteHandler instance. You can add as many routes as you want like this.

This method works great for small applications. However, if you have more than a couple routes it is much better to separate the route definition from the route logic. Consider the following class that will act as a controller of multiple routes:

public class Users {

    public void index(Request request, Response response) {
        // list the users
    }

    public void newForm(Request request, Response response) {
        // show the form for creating a user
    }

    public void create(Request request, Response response) {
        // create the user
    }

    ...
}

We can now define the routes as follows:

    Users users = new Users();

    RouterMiddleware router = new RouterMiddleware();
    router.addRoute(HttpMethod.GET, "/users", users, "index"); // list users
    router.addRoute(HttpMethod.GET, "/users/new", users, "newForm"); // new user form
    router.addRoute(HttpMethod.POST, "/users", users, "create"); // create user
    ...

A controller is just a Java class that has a public default constructor (i.e. no constructor specified or a constructor with no arguments) and an action is just a Java method that receives two arguments: a org.jogger.http.Request and a org.jogger.http.Response.

You can also use an external file to define your routes:

    FileSystemRoutesLoader routesLoader = new FileSystemRoutesLoader("routes.config");
    routesLoader.setBasePackage("com.mycompany.controllers"); // we don't want to repeat this for each controller
    
    RouterMiddleware router = new RouterMiddleware();
    router.setRoutes(routesLoader.load());

The routes.config file looks like this:

GET     /                Pages#index
GET     /users           Users#index
GET     /users/new       Users#newForm
POST    /users           Users#create
DELETE  /users/{id}      Users#delete
...

Path Variables

Path variables allow you to define routes with holders such as:

GET /users/{userId}       Users#show

{userId} acts as a holder that will match paths like /users/1 or /users/german.escobarc@gmail.com. You can retrieve path variables from you controllers using the org.jogger.http.Request#getPathVariable(String) method:

public class Users {
        
    public void show(Request request, Response response) {
        long userId = request.getPathVariable("userId").asLong();

        // retrieve the user and do your stuff
    }
}