How to add meta-data to an express route and then read them using router.stack?

Question

I have a set of routes that are defined in a routes.js file like so:

const express = require('express');
const router = express.Router();
const controller = require('../controllers/mycontroller');

router.get('/', controller.home);
router.get('/about', controller.about);
...

What I want to do is to be able to add some meta-data to each of these definitions, like so:

router.get('/', controller.home).metadata({title: 'Home Page', internal: true});

And then be able to read them in a for loop:

router.stack.forEach((route) => {

    const metadata = ???
});

How can I achieve this? I would need this information inside the controller as well, so in controller.home I will need to pass title to the appropriate template.

---

Can I use bind() for this? I thought maybe I can do:

router.get('/', controller.home).bind(key: 'value');

so that in the controller, I can do this.key. But how can I access this key in a router.stack for loop?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is the best approach, but I ended up defining a "route generating" function that takes in a url, title, metadata, and a list of middlewares and defines an appropriate get route. This acts as a small wrapper around the router module.

in utils/router.js:

const express = require('express');
const router = express.Router();

const addTitle = (title) => (req, res, next) => {
    res.locals.title = title;
    next();
}

const get = router.get;
router.get = function(url, title, internal, ...middlewares) {
    // do what's needed with metadata here
    // for example add them to the list of pages to be crawled
    get.call(router, url, addTitle(title), ...middlewares);
};

module.exports = router;

and in routes/my.routes.js:

const express = require('express');
const router = require('../utils/router');
const controller = require('../controllers/mycontroller');

router.get('/', 'Home', internal=true, controller.home);

...

module.exports = router;