Routing in locomotive using ejs

Question

I'm trying out node and some frameworks for node atm, specifically locomotive. However, i seem to be stuck on routing using locomotive. A couple questions i can't find the answer to, so here goes:

why does the locomotive out-of-box install use index.html.ejs as a filename? Why not just index.ejs? What's the benefit?
i'm trying to add a route to a view: searchName.html.ejs which i added in the views folder. To achieve this i made a toolController like this:
```
var locomotive = require('locomotive').Controller,
toolController = new Controller();

toolController.searchName = function() {
    this.render();
}

module.exports = toolController;
```
I also added a route in routes.js like so:
```
this.match('searchName', 'tool#searchName');
```
However, that doesn't work (and yet it's what the documentation says ought to work). The result is a 404 error. So how do i make that route work?
Suppose i want to make a route to eg, anExample.html? How do i go about that? I notice that in the out-of-the-box app from locomotive, you cannot enter localhost:3000/index.html . Nor even localhost:3000/index This seems highly impractical to me, as there are plenty of users who'll add the specific page they want to go to. So how can i make that work?

PS: I went through all questions regarding this on stackoverflow and searched the web, but i still can't figure this out.enter code here

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 22 '14 at 05:31

The benefit is that this naming scheme allows you to specify several different formats for a single route. So you could have search_name.html.ejs and search_name.xml.ejs, then respond with either view depending on what your client is expecting.
There are a couple issues with the example code you posted. You should be seeing a more descriptive error than a 404, so I'm not sure what's happening there, but here are the fixes to your code that work in my environment.

In the controller:
```
//tool_controller.js
var locomotive = require('locomotive');
var toolController = new locomotive.Controller();

toolController.searchName = function() {
  this.render();
};

module.exports = toolController;
```
In routes.js:
```
//routes.js
module.exports = function routes()
{
  this.match('searchName', 'tool#searchName');
}
```
Then, you'll need to change the view to this: views/tool/search_name.html.ejs. It's not clear from the documentation, but locomotive automatically lowercases and underscores actions that are camel-cased, like searchName.

Now start the app and browse to http://localhost:3000/searchName
If you just want to serve a static html file, the easiest way is to just drop it in the public folder. This folder is specifically for serving up static content like client-side js, css, etc. And it works just fine for serving static HTML as well.

Routing in locomotive using ejs

1 Answers1