Enabling the Routing

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to create an initial routing configuration in the application descriptor

Routing Overview

SAPUI5 offers hash-based navigation, which allows you to build single-page apps where the navigation is done by changing the hash. In this way, the browser does not have to reload the page.

Hash-based navigation enables bookmarks and deep links to pages inside an app; this means that you can start the app and resume the bookmarked state.

Watch this video to know about the principle of routing.

Routing Configuration

In the application descriptor, the routing configuration is found in the routing property of the sap.ui5 namespace. It consists of the following three sections: config, routes, and targets.

Let's explore each of the three sections of the routing property.

Initializing the Router

The router needs to be initialized by the component. To do this, get a reference to the router in the init method of the Component.js component controller and call the initialize method on it.

After initialization, the routing configuration in manifest.json is automatically enabled in the application: the current URL is evaluated and the corresponding views are automatically displayed.

Configure the Routing

Business Scenario

In the following exercises, the scenario is extended by a navigation option: When the user selects a customer in the customer table, a new view with details about the selected customer is to be displayed.

To be able to implement this navigation, you have to adapt the structure of the application: Until now, the component has used the App view as root view, which in turn contains an App UI element in whose pages aggregation the Overview is statically embedded. For navigation, however, the embedding of views in the pages aggregation must be done dynamically. The navigation is implemented in such a way that the views are exchanged in the pages aggregation through the router.

In this exercise, you will first restructure the application so that the Overview view is no longer statically embedded in the pages aggregation of the App UI element, but dynamically via routing configuration. In the following exercises, you will then implement the actual navigation on this basis.

Template:Git Repository: https://github.com/SAP-samples/sapui5-development-learning-journey.git, Branch: sol/21_OData_model_(create)
Model solution:Git Repository: https://github.com/SAP-samples/sapui5-development-learning-journey.git, Branch: sol/22_routing_configuration

Task 1: Remove the Overview View from the pages Aggregation of the App UI Element

Steps

  1. Open the App.view.xml file from the webapp/view folder in the editor.

  2. Delete the following lines in the implementation of the view to remove the static embedding of the Overview view in the pages aggregation of the App UI element:

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    <pages>
  <mvc:XMLView viewName="sap.training.exc.view.Overview"/>
</pages>

    Result

    The App view should now look like this:

  3. Add the id="app" attribute to the <App> tag to set an Id for the App UI element.

    Note

    The Id will be used later in the routing configuration to specify the App UI element as the parent to insert views.

Result

The App view should now look similar to the following:

Task 2: Configure the Routing in the Application Descriptor

Steps

  1. Open the manifest.json application descriptor from the webapp folder in the editor.

  2. In the application descriptor, look for the routing property in the sap.ui5 namespace:

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    "routing": {
  "config": {
    "routerClass": "sap.m.routing.Router",
    "viewType": "XML",
    "async": true,
    "viewPath": "sap.training.exc.view",
    "controlAggregation": "pages",
    "controlId": "<...>"
  },
  "routes": [],
  "targets": {}
}

    Note

    The three properties config, routes, and targets in the routing section define the routing and navigation structure of the application.

  3. Replace the "<...>" value of the controlId property with "app", which is the Id assigned above for the App UI element.

    Note

    According to this configuration, the router will now add views to the pages aggregation of the App UI element.

    Result

    The routing configuration should now look like this:

  4. Now add the following object to the routes array:

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    {
  "name": "overview",
  "pattern": "",
  "target": [
    "overview"
  ]
}

    Note

    This defines a route called overview, for which the target named overview is displayed when the hash of the browser is empty. The referenced overview target is defined in the next step.

    Result

    The routing configuration should now look like this:

  5. Finally, add the following property to the targets object:

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    "overview": {
  "viewId": "overview",
  "viewName": "Overview",
  "viewLevel": 1
}

    Note

    This defines that the overview target referenced above will be used to load the Overview view.

Result

The routing configuration should now look like this:

Task 3: Initialize the Router

Steps

  1. Open the Component.js file from the webapp folder in the editor.

  2. Add the following code to the end of the init method of the component controller:

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    this.getRouter().initialize();

    Note

    The routing configuration done above causes the router to load the Overview view into the pages aggregation of the App UI element when the hash of the browser is empty. To enable this configuration for the application, the router is initialized here.

    Result

    The initialization method of the component controller should now look like this:

  3. Test run your application by starting it from the SAP Business Application Studio.

    Caution

    Use the start-mock npm script to start the application.
    Make sure that the application works unchanged from the user's point of view: The Overview view is displayed in the browser. However, unlike the previous implementation, the Overview view is now embedded in the pages aggregation of the App UI element via routing.

    1. Right-click on any subfolder in your sapui5-development-learning-journey project and select Preview Application from the context menu that appears.

    2. Select the npm script named start-mock in the dialog that appears.

    3. In the opened application, check if the component works as expected.

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