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Using Dynamic segments to Reduce Code Redundancy of Recurring HTML in Open Event ember Frontend

While developing web apps, at times we require the same HTML for different pages in our app. This leads to redundancy and low code-reusability. This can be well managed in ember.js by using dynamic segments in our routes.

In Open Event Front-end we have a route named /sessions where we want to show the details of the event’s sessions and we want to categorize the sessions in all, pending, accepted, confirmed and rejected sessions hence want to create the following subroutes under it.

events/<event-id>/sessions
events/<event-id>/sessions/pending
events/<event-id>/sessions/accepted
events/<event-id>/sessions/confirmed
events/<event-id>/sessions/rejected

All of these subroutes show different data based on the routes in a table with exactly same fields. So if we use dynamic segments, we can decrease code redundancy and increase code reusability. So let us see how to add these subroutes as dynamic segments.

Firstly, we have to add a dynamic part (pending, accepted, confirmed, rejected) under our URL /sessions . For this, edit the following code snippet to the router.js file. In place of list write the name of route handler which handles our subroutes and in place of session_status write any identifier you want as session_status is the dynamic part which changes according to subroutes. In our case it will be pending, accepted, confirmed or rejected.

     this.route('sessions', function() {
        this.route('list', { path: '/:session_status' });
      });

To display all the sessions in our /sessions route, we have to edit index route handler and return data from model hook. Now when we hit  /sessions end point, the template which we are using redundantly, i.e. list.hbs, gets data from a model hook of this route handler.

Next we need to define a model hook in our list.js file which returns data for the dynamic routes. In list.js, we would want to change the title of our page according to the dynamic segments. These dynamic segments are available under model hook in this route under param parameter. We are using this.set which sets the provided key or path to the value. Make this available in titleToken function and by applying simple switch case, we can change the title dynamically.

Till now, we could access our dynamic segments by manually changing the URL. Let’s add a link to do this transition automatically for us. For this, we edit our session.hbs file and provide links using a linkto helper. One thing to take care here is that we should pass the dynamic segments along with the link-to helper.

{{#link-to 'events.view.sessions.list' 'pending' class='item'}}

Here, pending is the dynamic segment which we are passing to our route handler. Similarly, we can make the links for all our dynamic segments. Also in this template, we should provide outlets for the common template i.e list.hbs which will be reused by other dynamic subroutes. And finally, we define our reusable template in list.hbs file.

Now when we hit on different links we are redirected to different routes which are using different data but same templates. Also, we can see this transition in our URL and title.

To know more about dynamic segments refer to Ember guide.

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