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<router-component>

A simple, declarative router component for single-page apps that allows you to load Web Components dynamically when urls are requested, without performing a hard reload of the entire page.

Benefits

  • Very lightweight (there is very little code in this library)
  • Only provides routing needs and nothing more
  • Easy, declarative html syntax -- no complex configuration files or routing engines
  • Automatically intercepts all <a> tags on a page (that contain relative hrefs) to prevent them from causing page reloads, which use pushState() API.

Installation

npm i router-component

Prerequisites

This library assumes you are using a browser that supports Web Components and that you are using them as your routed elements. They are the future of the web and are already implemented natively in browsers.

For advanced usage of this library, you will need to know Regular Expressions and how they work in JavaScript.

Usage

Basic Example

<!-- index.html -->

<html>
<head>
    <script type="module" src="node_modules/router-component/dist/router-component.js"></script>
    <script type="module">
        customElements.define('first-page', class extends HTMLElement {
            connectedCallback() {
                this.innerHTML = `
                    Navigated to ${window.location.pathname} <br />` + //"/"
                    `Go to <a href="/second/view">second page</a>.`
                ;
            }
        });
        customElements.define('second-page', class extends HTMLElement {
            connectedCallback() {
                this.innerHTML = `
                    Navigated to ${window.location.pathname} <br />` + // "/second/view" OR "/second/view/"
                    `Go to <a href="/doesnt/work">a page that doesnt exist</a>.`
                ;
            }
        });
        customElements.define('page-doesnt-exist', class extends HTMLElement {
            connectedCallback() {
                this.innerHTML = `<p>Wrong page, go to <a href="/">first page again</a></p>`;
            }
        });
    </script>
</head>
<body>
<router-component>
    <first-page path="^/(index.html)?$"></first-page>
    <second-page path="/second/view[/]?"></second-page>
    <page-doesnt-exist path=".*"></page-doesnt-exist>
</router-component>
</body>
</html>

More Examples

Code samples showing how to use this package can be found in the examples folder. To run them, pull down this project and

npm run start-server

Which will make the examples available at http://localhost:3239/examples/.

<router-component> API

The <router-component> can be passed the following:

Option Type Description
hash-scroll-behavior Number The ScrollBehavior value that will be used when the router scrolls to the anchored element with an id attribute that matches the hash identifier in the URL requested.
hash-scroll-delay Number The number of milliseconds to delay the router's scrolling to the anchored element on a page
show-delay Number The number of milliseconds to delay before the router adds each page to the DOM and triggers its connectedCallback (useful to implement some sort of animation or transition of a previous page first)
hide-delay Number The number of milliseconds to delay before the router removes each page from the DOM and triggers its disconnectedCallback
showing-page Custom Event Event that is triggered when the page is added to the DOM. The page that is added is passed as the detail property on the emitted event.
hiding-page Custom Event Event that is triggered when the page is removed from the DOM. The page being removed is passed as the detail property on the emitted event.

Route API

Each child element of <router-component> should be a CustomElement so that the following attributes can be passed to them:

Option Type Description
path String A regex expression that the browser URL needs to match in order for the component to render. Capture groups are also supported to allow for dynamic parameters in URLs.
search-params String A search string regex that the requested page would need to have in order to match. Setting this value to foo=[bar|baz] would match index.html?foo=bar for instance)
document-title String The title of the document that will be shown when the route is active

Routing

The goal of this package is to leverage the use of existing browser APIs, while providing only a few key pieces of logic that make routing easier, which is identified below.

Changing Routes

There are two ways that a route can be changed.

  1. By clicking on a relative link that is nested within a route element or
  2. Programmatically using the pushState() or replaceState() API
window.history.pushState({}, null, '/new-url');

Each method will trigger the route-changed event that is dispatched by the router component itself, which is illustrated in the next section below.

In the rare case you would like to push a new state or change the current location without triggering a new route, you can pass triggerRouteChange flag like this:

window.history.pushState({ triggerRouteChange: false }, null, '/new-url');

Router will clean up the triggerRouteChange property in history.state, so you don't need to worry about clearing it out.

Detecting Route Changes

You can listen to route changes that are triggered either by link clicks or via History's pushState() or replaceState API

<html>
    <head>
        <script
            type="module"
            src="node_modules/router-component/dist/router-component.js"
        ></script>
        <script type="module">
            const router = document.body.querySelector('router-component');
            router.addEventListener('route-changed', () => {
                // called everytime the route changes!
            });
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <router-component>
            <other-page path="/other[/]?"></other-page>
            <fallback-page path=".*"></fallback-page>
        </router-component>
    </body>
</html>

Development

To run tests:

npm test

To debug and run locally:

npm start