Dhananjay Kumar

For further advanced reading you may want to prefer REST API using express .

I have started learning Node.JS and for web apps most popular ExpressJS framework. Well few call it big library as well. As learner does not matter whether big library or framework, let’s start exploring.

While exploring express realised that one of the most vital concept of express is Routing. In this post I will try to share my learning on express Routing with you. If you are starting with Express feel free to have a look on Setup Express and run first application in Node.js .

Let us assume that you have created first site using express. In root folder you will find App.js file. Go ahead and open App.js. In top you will find two modules express and http are imported along with other modules.

Express uses HTTP verbs to perform routings hence HTTP module is imported and of course to work with express framework express module is imported. Since express routes are based on HTTP verbs so method names are also matched. Refer following table for same.

You can create a route as below,

Above route will be accessed using HTTP GET on application being accessed on base address. As shown below you can see that plain text is sent in response object from express application.

In Express if you have two route paths with same address rather throwing error it will pick route path defined first in App.js

Assume you want to pass parameter while doing HTTP GET operation in above route then you have two choices. Either create two routes as shown below.

Second route will be accessed when a parameter will be passed while performing HTTP GET. So if you access application as below you will get served from second route path.

You may want to create only one route path making id as optional. Id can be make optional by putting it inside : id? This can be done as below,

Route path created above can handle both types of request either with parameter or without parameter. We are checking for the parameter and on basis of that different response being delivered. So bottom line is combination of 😕 makes parameter optional.

Express converts a route to regular expression internally. Input parameter can be parsed using req.params.id where is name of the parameter.

You can pass more than one parameters as shown below. We are making op as optional by placing it inside : ?

With second optional parameter application can be fetched as below. As you see we are passing id and op both while doing HTTP GET.

Express allow you to created REST based route path using *. So if I want to pass any number of parameters doing HTTP GET that can be done appending *

You can pass any number of parameters to access above created route path now.

If you try to access route which is not created then you will get error message as below. loo route is not there in rout paths so express is throwing error as below,

You can create routes with other HTTP VERBS . Method names are matched with HTTP verbs as discussed in beginning of this post.

You can test other operations like PUT , DELETE , POST in fiddler. This is how you can work with routing in express. For further advanced reading you may want to prefer REST API using express . Do not get overwhelmed with Visual Studio there in this post and follow the post to create REST API in any of your favourite code editor. I hope this post is useful to you.

If you want to create routes using crossroads then this post may help you

Create a Router in Node.js using crossroads