Working with routers

The Backbone router provides methods to route client-side pages by using hash fragments or standard URLs as per the History API. Routes that use the hash fragments or History API may look like this:

// Hash fragment
http://www.foo.com/#user/23

// Standard URL
http://www.foo.com/user/23

The routes and actions that will be triggered when the URL fragment matches the specific routes are defined in the routes object of the router:

routes: {
  'users' : 'showUsers',
  'user/:id' : 'showUserDetails',
  'user/:id/update' : 'updateUser'
}

Now, let's see how we can create a basic router. Assume that we are developing an application with a few modules, among which the User module is an important one.

var AppRouter = Backbone.Router.extend({
  routes: {
    'users': 'showUsers',
    'user/:id': 'showUserDetails',
    'user/:id/update': 'updateUser',
    'user/:id/remove': 'removeUser'
  },

  showUsers: function () {
    // Get all the user details from server and 
    // show the...