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.

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.

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.

Match URL patterns to view controllers:

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Copyright (c) 2011 Aaron Brethorst

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