Rest with Express.js nested router

Suppose I want to have REST endpoints which look roughly like this:

/user/
/user/user_id 

/user/user_id/items/
/user/user_id/items/item_id

CRUD on each if makes sense. For example, /user POST creates a new user, GET fetches all users. /user/user_id GET fetches just that one user.

Items are user specific so I put them under user_id, which is a particular user.

Now to make Express routing modular I made a few router instances. There is a router for user, and a router for the item.

var userRouter = require('express').Router();
userRouter.route('/')
  .get(function() {})
  .post(function() {})
userRouter.route('/:user_id')
  .get(function() {})

var itemRouter = require('express').Router();
itemRouter.route('/')
  .get(function() {})
  .post(function() {})
itemRouter.route('/:item_id')
  .get(function() {})

app.use('/users', userRouter);

// Now how to add the next router?
// app.use('/users/', itemRouter);

URL to item is descendents of the URL hierarchy of the user. Now how do I get URL with /users whatever to userRouter but the more specific route of /user/*user_id*/items/ to the itemRouter? And also, I would like user_id to be accessible to itemRouter as well, if possible.

Answer

You can nest routers by attaching them as middleware on an other router, with or without params.

You must pass {mergeParams: true} to the child router if you want to access the params from the parent router.

mergeParams was introduced in Express 4.5.0 (Jul 5 2014)

In this example the itemRouter gets attached to the userRouter on the /:userId/items route

This will result in following possible routes:

GET /user -> hello user
GET /user/5 -> hello user 5
GET /user/5/items -> hello items from user 5
GET /user/5/items/6 -> hello item 6 from user 5

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

var userRouter = express.Router();
// you need to set mergeParams: true on the router,
// if you want to access params from the parent router
var itemRouter = express.Router({mergeParams: true});

// you can nest routers by attaching them as middleware:
userRouter.use('/:userId/items', itemRouter);

userRouter.route('/')
    .get(function (req, res) {
        res.status(200)
            .send('hello users');
    });

userRouter.route('/:userId')
    .get(function (req, res) {
        res.status(200)
            .send('hello user ' + req.params.userId);
    });

itemRouter.route('/')
    .get(function (req, res) {
        res.status(200)
            .send('hello items from user ' + req.params.userId);
    });

itemRouter.route('/:itemId')
    .get(function (req, res) {
        res.status(200)
            .send('hello item ' + req.params.itemId + ' from user ' + req.params.userId);
    });

app.use('/user', userRouter);

app.listen(3003);