Controllers

Controllers

Angel has built-in, reflection-based support for MVC controllers. This is yet another way to define routes in a manageable group. You can also use a Service, an Angel instance, or the base Routable class.

Rather than extending from Routable, controllers return an AngelConfigurer when called. This configurer will wire all your routes for you.

The glue that holds it all together is the Expose annotation:

class Expose {
  final String method;
  final Pattern path;
  final List middleware;
  final String as;
  final List<String> allowNull;

  const Expose(Pattern this.path,
      {String this.method: "GET",
      List this.middleware: const [],
      String this.as: null,
      List<String> this.allowNull: const[]});
}

Most fields are self-explanatory, save for as and allowNull. See, request parameters are mapped to function parameters on each handler. If a parameter is null, an error will be thrown. To prevent this, you can pass its name to allowNull.

@Expose(path: "/foo/:id?", allowNull: const["id"])

The other is as. This allows you to specify a custom name for a controller class or action. ResponseContext contains a method, redirectToAction that can redirect to a controller action.

@Expose(path: "/foo")
class FooController extends Controller {
  @Expose(path: "/some/strange/url", as: "bar")
  someActionWithALongNameThatWeWouldLikeToShorten(int id) async {
  }
}

main() async {
  Angel app = new Angel();

  app.get("/some/path", (req, res) async => res.redirectToAction("FooController@bar", {"id": 1337}));
}

If you do not specify an as, then controllers and actions will be available by their names in code. Reflection is cool, huh?

import 'package:angel_framework/angel_framework.dart';

@Expose(path: "/todos")
class TodoController extends Controller {

  @Expose(path: "/:id")
  getTodo(int id) async {
    return await someAsyncAction();
  }
}

main() async {
  Angel app = new Angel();
  await app.configure(new TodoController());
}

Controllers can also interact with requests and responses. All you have to do is declare a RequestContext or ResponseContext as a parameter, and it will be passed to the function.

@Expose(path: "/hello")
class HelloController extends Controller {
  @Expose(path: "/") Future getIndex(ResponseContext res) async => await res.render("hello");
}