Routing

Remarks#

Routes are rules that tell Sails what to do when faced with an incoming request.

Routes are defined in config/routes.js. The order of the routes is significant, as routes are matched top down. This means if you have a specific route that also could be matched by a wildcard route, the specific route should be defined above the wildcard route.

When a request enters your application sails.js grabs all the parameters that came with it and makes them available for you as params on the request object.

Properties in the route target object will be passed through to the route handler in the req.options object. The following are reserved properties that can affect the behavior of the route handler:

Property	Applicable Target Types	Data Type	Details
skipAssets	all	Boolean	Set to `true` if you don’t want the route to match URLs with dots in them (e.g. myImage.jpg). This will keep your routes with wildcard notation from matching URLs of static assets. Useful when creating URL slugs.
skipRegex	all	Regexp	If skipping every URL containing a dot is too permissive, or you need a route’s handler to be skipped based on different criteria entirely, you can use `skipRegex`. This option allows you to specify a regular expression or array of regular expressions to match the request URL against; if any of the matches are successful, the handler is skipped. Note that unlike the syntax for binding a handler with a regular expression, `skipRegex` expects _actual RegExp objects, not strings.
locals	controller, view, blueprint, response	Dictionary	Sets default local variables to pass to any view that is rendered while handling the request.
cors	all	Dictionary or Boolean or String	Specifies how to handle requests for this route from a different origin.
populate	blueprint	Boolean	Indicates whether the results in a “find” or “findOne” blueprint action should have associated model fields populated. Defaults to the value set in `config/blueprints.js`.
skip, limit, sort, where	blueprint	Dictionary	Set criteria for “find” blueprint.
## Custom RESTful route definitions

module.exports.routes = {
    'GET /foo': 'FooController.index',
    'GET /foo/new': 'FooController.new',
    'POST /foo/create': 'FooController.create',
    'GET /foo/:id/edit': 'FooController.edit',
    'PUT /foo/:id/update': 'FooController.update',
    'GET /foo/:id': 'FooController.show',
    'DELETE /foo/:id': 'FooController.delete',
};

Redirect

module.exports.routes = {
  '/foo': '/bar',
  'GET /google': 'https://www.google.com'
};

Define custom variable for all views

module.exports.routes = {
  // This function will be executed for all http verbs on all urls
  'all /*', function (req, res, next) {
    // Expose the function `fooBar` to all views (via the locals object)
    res.locals.fooBar = function (arg1) {
      return 'foobar' + arg1;
    };
  },
};

Skip assets (urls with dots in them) from wildcard route

module.exports.routes = {
  'GET /foo/*': {
     fn: function(req, res) {
       res.send("FOO!");
     },
     skipAssets: true
  },
};

Routes with RegEx

module.exports.routes = {
    // sends matching regex (few patterns) as 'page' param
    'r|/foo/([0-9]+)|page': 'FooController.get',
    'r|/foo/(.*)|page': 'FooController.get',
    'r|/foo/(\\w+)|page': 'FooController.get'
};

URL slugs

module.exports.routes = {
  'GET /blog/:year/:month/:day/:posttitle/': 'BlogController.showPost',
  'GET /blog/:year/:month/:day/': 'BlogController.showDayArchive',
  'GET /blog/:year/:month/': 'BlogController.showMonthArchive',
  'GET /blog/:year/': 'BlogController.showYearArchive',
};

The parameters passed in the URL can then be accessed in the corresponding controller actions using req.param('year'), req.param('month') etc.

For example, a GET request to /blog/2016/08/ triggers the BlogController.showMonthArchive controller action, with req.param('year') having the value 2016 and req.param('month') having the value 08.