trjhtr

I'm currently working on a large web application with numerous routes. Currently, our routes are in one large list in a single JSON file. We recently ran into a problem due to the precedence of params being set from top to bottom in the file. This question details the issue we encountered further: Node.js Express route naming and ordering: how is precedence determined?

My plan is to propose an alternate routing solution based on my work from a personal project. I feel like it's a valid suggestion but missed out on a chance to really make my case in a meeting the other day. Here is a routes.js file from my personal project that demonstrates the pattern I would like to use, let me know what you think or of possible better alternatives/edits. Thanks!

By creating separate routers for each resource, different controllers can access the same URLs without the params being overridden.

const express = require('express');

const usersRouter = express.Router();
const songsRouter = express.Router();
const playlistsRouter = express.Router();

const usersController = require('../controllers/users');
const songsController = require('../controllers/songs');
const playlistController = require('../controllers/playlists');

usersRouter.route('/')
 .post(usersController.create)

songsRouter.route('/')
 .get(songsController.index)
 .post(songsController.create)

playlistsRouter.route('/')
 .get(playlistController.index)
 .post(playlistController.create)

songsRouter.route('/:id')
 .get(songsController.show)
 .put(songsController.update)
 .delete(songsController.destroy)

playlistsRouter.route('/:id')
 .get(playlistController.show)
 .put(playlistController.update)
 .delete(playlistController.destroy)

module.exports = 
 songs: songsRouter,
 playlists: playlistsRouter,
 users: usersRouter,
; 

A couple questions that come to my mind are:

1. How optimal it would be to have all those Express router instances?


2. Is this approach scalable?

absolutely, you should compose your express application in terms of a hierarchy of routers

1. instancing all those routers should be negligible in terms of your application's performance




2. this is the only approach i can imagine feasibly maintaining at scale, it buys you some separation of concerns