angular-flux-routing-example

Achieving Reasonable Scalability in Angular with Flux and Routing

NOTE: The routing code in this repo has been refactored (to be simpler) since I published the Medium article, but the article does not yet have the updated code. The changes mostly effect action-creator.js and stores.js.

running

There is no build process, so just

npm install
npm start

Then open http://localhost:3300/

what's reasonable scalability?

first setup our routes in routeStore. We're using yahoo's routr, it supports params the same way ui-router does but we don't need them for this example:

router: new Router({

  home: {
    path: '/',
    method: 'get'
  },

  about: {
    path: '/about',
    method: 'get'
  }

}),

then handle routing in our Action Creator like a boss:

// we define all of our route handling logic here,
// these functions take the place of ui-router's resolve blocks
// navigate to home
home: function(route) {

  // If colors have already loaded, just dispatch the `route` action
  // This way, the colors will only be loaded once through the life-cycle
  // of the application

  if (! colorStore.colorsLoaded) {
    // if colors haven't been loaded, show the loading indicator
    // and send a request to colorApi
    // once colors are loaded, dispatch the `loaded:colors` action to
    // process the color data, then dispatch `route` to complete routing
    // and finally dispatch `loadingIndicator:hide` to hide the loading indicator
    dispatcher.dispatch('loadingIndicator:show');
    colorApi.fetch().success(function(data) {
      dispatcher.dispatch('loaded:colors', {colors: data});
      dispatcher.dispatch('route', {route:route});
      dispatcher.dispatch('loadingIndicator:hide');
    });

    return false;
  }
},

// navigate to about
about: function(route) {

  // whenever the 'about' route is loaded, we re-load
  // the about data with aboutApi.
  // This probably makes little sense in a real-world application,
  // but contrast this to how the color data is only loaded one
  // time in the 'home' route above

  dispatcher.dispatch('loadingIndicator:show');

  aboutApi.fetch().success(function(data) {
    dispatcher.dispatch('loaded:about', {people: data});
    dispatcher.dispatch('route', {route:route});
    dispatcher.dispatch('loadingIndicator:hide');
  });

  return false;
},

now tell me you still want to use resolve blocks!?

still using ui-router?

Yeah, we're still using ui-router in this demo but it's only being used for it's ui-view directive. We're not using it's state machine or URL matching capabilities because they are too tightly coupled. So ui-router could easily be replaced by any number of other solutions.

notes

Don't try this at home: I hacked a browserified routr.js to expose Router globally just to keep things simple for this demo.