Including

Sometimes you don’t want to define all your routes in one place, you want to be modular right!? You can do that too with Flask-Via.

Include Router

The most basic way of including other routes is to use the flask_via.routers.Include router. This is not a intended replacement or implementation of Flask blueprints, just a simple way of putting routes somewhere else in your application.

Arguments:

• routes_module: Python dotted path to the route module as a string.

Keyword Arguments:

• routes_name: (Optional) If you have not called the list of routes in the moduke routes you can set that here, for example urls.
• url_prefix: (optional) Add a url prefix to all routes included

Example

Assume the following application structure:

/path/to/foo
    - bar/
        - __init__.py
        - routes.py
        - views.py
    - __int__.py
    - routes.py

In the top level routes.py we would have:

from flask.ext.via.routers import Include

routes = [
    Include('foo.bar.routes')
]

In the foo.routes we would have:

from flask.ext.via.routes import default
from foo.bar.views import some_view

routes = [
    default.Basic('/bar', some_view)
]

You can see this in action with the Small Application Example.

URL Prefixes

The flask_via.routers.Include class also allows you to add a url_prefix similar to blueprints.

The following routers support the url_prefix being passed to their add_to_app methods:

• flask_via.routers.default.Basic
• flask_via.routers.default.Pluggable
• flask_via.routers.default.Blueprint

Example

Assume the same application structure as in the above examples except the top level routes.py now looks like this:

from flask.ext.via.routers import Include

routes = [
    Include('foo.bar.routes', url_prefix='/foo')
]

This will result in the url to the view becoming /foo/bar instead of /bar.

Blueprint Router

Flask Blueprints are also supported allowing Flask-Via to automatically register blueprints on the application and routes on the blueprint, this is provided by the flask_via.routers.default.Blueprint router.

Arguments:

• name : Blueprint name
• module: Python module path to blueprint module

Keyword Arguments:

• routes_module_name: The module Flask-Via will look for within the blueprint module which contains the routes, defaults to routes
• routes_name: If you have not called the list of routes in the module routes you can set that here, for example urls.
• static_folder: Path to static files for blueprint, defaults to None
• static_url_path: URL path for blueprint static files, defaults to None
• template_folder: Templates folder name, defaults to None
• url_prefix: URL prefix for routes served within the blueprint, defaults to None
• subdomain : Sub domain for blueprint, defaults to None
• url_defaults: Callback function for URL defaults for this blueprint. It’s called with the endpoint and values and should update the values passed in place, defaults to None.

Example

Let us assume we have the following application structure:

/path/to/foo
    - bar/
        - templates/
            - foo.html
        - __init__.py
        - routes.py
        - views.py
    - __int__.py
    - routes.py

In the above structure bar is a Flask blueprint which we wish to add to our flask application, so our top level routes would look like this:

from flask.ext.via.routers.default import Blueprint

routes = [
    Blueprint('bar', 'foo.bar', template_folder='templates')
]

You will note we give the blueprint a name and pass the top level module path to the blueprint rather than a path to the routes file.

In our blueprints views we can define routes as normal:

from flask.ext.via.routes import default
from foo.bar.views import some_view

routes = [
    default.Basic('/bar', some_view)
]

Note

All routes will be added to the blueprint rather than the flask application, this applies to any routes included using the Include router.

Including Blueprints

You can use the flask_via.routers.Include router to also include blueprints, you can even add url_prefix to prefix the blueprints url_prefix, crazy eh?

Example

Let us assume we have the same application structure as in the earlier blueprint examples, except our top level routes.py now looks like this:

from flask.ext.via.routers import default, Include

routes = [
    Include('foo.routes', routes_name='api', url_prefix='/api/v1')
]

api = [
    default.Blueprint('bar', 'foo.bar', url_prefix='/bar')
    # These don't exist but just for illustraion purposes
    default.Blueprint('baz', 'foo.baz', url_prefix'/baz')
    default.Blueprint('fap', 'foo.fap', url_prefix'/fap')
]

Here we will include all the routes defined in the api list which are all blueprints, each blueprint will be registered with a url_prefix of /api/v1 as well their url prefixes for the blueprint, so the above blueprints will be accessible on the followibg urls:

• /api/v1/bar
• /api/v1/baz
• /api/v1/fap

If each of these blueprints had a route defined with a url of /bar these would be accessed on the following urls:

• /api/v1/bar/bar
• /api/v1/baz/bar
• /api/v1/fap/bar

Hopefully you can see from this that flask_via.routers.Include coupled with flask_via.routers.default.Blueprint can offer some potentially powerful routing options for your application.