Question

I’m using express and I’d like to clean up my hard-coded URLs. There seem to be a number of projects which produce urlFor functionality on the server-side. Is there a best practice for doing this on the client-side?

Answer 1

I ended up building a shared module which exports two functions: pathRaw, and pathFor.

pathRaw outputs a path which can be consumed by the express routing mechanism. For example:

pathRaw('user.video.new');

returns '/users/:userid/videos/new'. Note that I’m using the pluralization functionality from mongoose.

pathFor takes the output from pathRaw and replaces the ids. For example:

pathFor('user.message.index', {userid: 'u1'});

returns '/users/u1/messages'. Note that additional values are converted to query parameters.

There are a few other features like path overrides that I’ve added. I’ll probably put this up on github once the code is a little more battle tested.