Sailsjs route and template rendering

Question

This question is directed to anyone with both flask (python) and sailsjs knowledge. I am very new to the concept of web frameworks and such. I started using flask but now I must use Sailsjs. In flask, I can define a route as:

@app.route('/company/<org_name>')
def myfunction(org_name):
    ...use org_name to filter my database and get data for that company...
    return render_template('companies.html', org_name=org_name, mydata=mydata)

Where I can use myfunction() to render a template in which I can pass the parameters org_name and mydata.

In sails, I am confused as to how to define my route with a given parameter. I understand:

'/': {
view: 'companies'
}

but I am not sure how to make the route dynamic in order to accept any variable org_name.

Another problem is that in python, mydata is a query from a MySQL database. I have the same data base connected to Sailsjs with the model completely set up but I am sure this model is useless. The site that I am creating will not be producing any new data (i.e. I will neither be updating nor saving new data to the database).

My Question is thus: with

'/company/:org_name': {
view: 'companies'
}

where should I create the function that filters the database? how should I be sure that sails will pass that org_name parameter into the function and how should I pass the data as a parameter into an html template?

Thanks a ton.

Answer 1

There are 2 options here but it helps to explain a bit about each in order for you to pick the best course of action.

Firstly, routes...You can indeed as you have shown render a view from a route directly, but you can also do a few other things. Below are 2 snippets from the sails.js website docs:

1. module.exports.routes = { 'get /signup': { view: 'conversion/signup' }, 'post /signup': 'AuthController.processSignup', 'get /login': { view: 'portal/login' }, 'post /login': 'AuthController.processLogin', '/logout': 'AuthController.logout', 'get /me': 'UserController.profile' }

2. 'get /privacy': { view: 'users/privacy', locals: { layout: 'users' } },

Snippet 1 shows how you can render a view directly as you have shown but also how you can point to a controller in order to do some more complex logic.

The login within your controller could mean that for the /me "GET" route you can execute a database query within the "profile" method to accept a get parameter, find a user and then display a view with the users data within. An example of that would be:

Profile: function (req,res){
User.find({name: req.param('name')}.exec(function founduser(err,result){
  return view('profile',{userdata: result});
});
}

In the second snipped from the sails docs you can see "locals" being mentioned. Here in the GET privacy route we see that the view is being told whether to use the layout template or not. However, with that being said there is nothing stopping you pushing more into the locals such as users name etc.

In my opinion and what I feel is best practice, I would leave your routes.js to be quite thin and logicless, put the database queries/logic/redirections in to your controller.

For your specific example:

My routes.js file may look like this

// config/routes.js
module.exports.routes = {
  'get /companies': 'CompanyController.index',
  'get /companies/:orgname': 'CompanyController.company'
}

This allows the first route to potentially show a list of companies by going to /companies and my second route may fire when a get request is made based on clicking a company name e.g. /companies/Siemens

My CompanyController.js for these may look like this:

    module.exports = {
  index: function (req, res) {
    return res.view('companieslist');
  },
  company: function (req, res) {
    var companyName = req.param('orgname'); //Get the company name supplied

    //My company model which could be in api/models as Company.js is used to find the company
    Company.find({name: companyName}).limit(1).exec(function companyresult(err,result){
 //Error catch
 if(err){return res.negotiate(err)};
 //The result of our query is pushed into the view as a local
 return res.view('company',{companydata: result}); //Within the .find callback to ensure we keep async
 });

  }
};

In my view I can access the data retrieved under "companydata" e.g. for EJS:

<%=companydata[0].name%>

If you need any further help/clarifications let me know. I do recommend taking a look at the sails.js documentation but if you really want to get your head around things I recommend sails.js in Action which is an ebook from mannings. A couple of days of reading really got me up to speed!