Routes and controllers
======================
Basic functioning
------------------------------
When a client (e.g. a web browser) sends a request to a Vitya website, Vitya looks for the corresponding **route**. The route then calls the associated **controller**. The controller can either return a **string** that is sent back to the client as html, or send a **response object**.
We will present the response object more in details in the next chapters.
For now, let's focus on the functioning of routes and controllers and where to find them.
Routes
--------
You will find the ``routes.json`` file under ``private/app``. After installing your minimal application, the file contains a sample route called ``homepage`` inside a pair of curly braces ::
{
"homepage": {
"path": "/",
"callable": "App\\AppController::homepage",
"methods": ["GET"]
}
}
Here you can add your custom routes.
The value in the **path** line is what the client sends in order to call this particular route.
The value in the **callable** line contains the location of the controller that corresponds to this route.
Controllers
---------------
By convention, all Vitya controllers are to be placed under ``private/app/src``. This means that all the controllers of your application share the same namespace ``App``.
The basic setup has already created an ``AppController.php`` file, our controller class::
namespace App;
use Vitya\Application\Controller\AbstractController;
class AppController extends AbstractController
{
public function homepage(): string
{
$html = '
Homepage
Hello world!
This is a Vitya application.
';
return $html;
}
}
In the example given, our class AppController extends the class ``Vitya\Application\Controller\AbstractController``. Right after the namespace indication, the **use** line mentions the full name of the class, so that we can simply call it ``AbstractController`` from now on.
This example is the simplest kind of controller we can make: it takes no parameters, it returns an html string.
In the next chapters, we'll see how we can pass parameters to a controller and how to call Vitya services inside our controllers.