Controller

Controllers are an addition to Rendr that do not exist in Backbone. Controllers define functions (known as actions) that the router will invoke when a URL is visited. This allows us to have a cleaner router.

Controllers have no base class, as they are simply objects containing functions. Simply create files in the controllers/ directory of your application and follow the naming convention: <name>_controller.js. The name is how the router will know which file to open. The keys of the object being exported are the actions for a controller.

Example Controller:

// controllers/users_controller.js
module.exports = {
  index: function(params, callback) {
    var spec = {
      collection: { collection: 'Users', params: {} }
    };

    this.app.set('title', 'Users');
    this.app.fetch(spec, callback);
  },

  show: function(params, callback) {
    var spec = {
      model: {
        model: 'User', params: { id: params.id }
      }
    };

    this.app.fetch(spec, function (err, results) {
      // return if there is an error fetching the user
      if (err) return callback(err);

      // set the title of the page to the users name
      this.app.set('title', results.model.get('name'));

      // render the page with the results from the fetch
      callback(null, results);
    }.bind(this));
  }
};

The above example creates a controller with two actions, index and show. The index action will display all the users, and the show action will show a specific user by their id.

Example routes.js file:

module.exports = function(addRoute) {
  addRoute('/users', 'users#index');
  addRoute('/users/:id', 'users#show');
};

Note how the routes.js file will match the controller's name and the action.

action

The action is defined in the controller file. It is a key in the module.exports object.

Example:

// content of users_controller.js
module.exports = {
  index: function (params, callback) {
    callback()
  }
};

The example above will add the index action to the users_controller. To connect the controller's action to a route, simply add addRoute('/users', 'users#index') to the app/routes.js file.

name

All controllers are required to have the _controller.js postfix. The name of the controller is the filename before the postfix.

For example: users_controller.js has the name users.

The router uses this naming convention to generate the handler in addRouteDefinition, but a name attribute isn't actually stored.