Layouts as a Convention over Configuration

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I tried a quick search and couldn’t find a discussion, so I thought I’d start my own.

Have you considered wrapping layouts at the Router level instead of inside each component? I think that would be more Rails-like and would feel less like boilerplate as a convention over configuration pattern.

For example:

    <Router>
      <Route path="/" page={HomePage} name="home" layout={BlogLayout} />
      <Route path="/users/{type}" page={UsersPage} name="users" layout={BlogLayout} />
    </Router>

or

    <Router>
      <Route path="/users" layout={BlogLayout} >
        <Route path="/{type}" page={UsersPage} name="users" />
      </Route>
    </Router>

…might be cool.

Just a suggestion.

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2

Hey @toobulkeh. Thanks for bringing this up! As far as the router goes, there’s a lot of important design decisions that have to be made, and this is definitely one of them.

I wasn’t a part of the discussion when it happened, but I think this has been discussed, especially since too many things are re-rendering on navigation and putting layouts at the router level might mitigate some of that:

When I last talked to @mojombo (paraphrasing here/hope I’m getting this right), one of the reasons to push-back a bit against having layouts at the router level was just that: that they’re at the router level and we’re not sure if binding layouts to URLs makes sense/is a good decision, though you’re totally right about eliminating boilerplate.

For the second example code block, having routes flat instead of nested is one of Redwood’s design decisions (that I think comes from Rails?) that we super like and hope we don’t have to part with. We just think routes are easier to track down/reason about this way. But nesting routes solve problems that flat routes don’t. So we have to figure those problems out too.

This is all to say that we have a lot of shaping to do, so thanks for kicking this off, and if you (or anyone!) have strong, well-thought-out opinions, we want to hear them!

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