About

Jeff Verkoeyen has alluded to the creation of a Three20'esque URL<->View Controller router for Nimbus as part of his SOCKit project...but I had a very real need for such a thing earlier today. So, I made one. A rather braindead URL->View Controller mapper, but it serves my purposes well enough.

There is a very simple example project included. The intention of this router is that it will be extremely easy to plug into a subclass of AFNetworking's AFRestClient. And, assuming that your REST API subscribes to some notions of HATEOAS, it should be incredibly easy to connect to your backend.

Why

I don't know about you, but I'm really tired of explicitly importing and pushing view controllers. It feels incredibly brittle. So, why not outsource the responsibility? Tell one object about all of your view controllers and make it figure things out.

Some Specifics

Every view controller that wants to participate in the routing system must implement the Routable protocol. And they should be initializable solely through their -init method. That's it. You can't route the root yet.

In your App Delegate

Match URL patterns to view controllers:

[[ABRouter sharedRouter] match:@"/api/path" to:[MyViewController class]];

In your parent view controllers

Create, populate, and push view controllers:

[[ABRouter sharedRouter] navigateTo:[dict objectForKey:@"url"] withNavigationController:self.navigationController];

or

[[ABRouter sharedRouter] display:obj withNavigationController:self.navigationController];

-display:withNavigationController: is a little janky at present, as it expects your object to have a -path method, but I haven't added a protocol for objects to enforce this. Soon, I promise.

In your subordinate view controllers

Implement the Routable protocol, including the apiPath NSString property and optionally the parameters NSDictionary.

Examples

Example

A super-simple example that shows how this works without involving anything ugly, like pulling data over the wire. :)

GowallaExample

Shows you a list of the closest Gowalla 'spots' to where I was at the time of writing this example. Tap a spot to show more information about it. This example pulls in AFNetworking, and attempts to demonstrate the value of this sort of URL/view controller routing system.

MappingExample

Demonstrates how to pass a dictionary of keys and values from the URL to the target view controller.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2011 Aaron Brethorst

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
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FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.