nodejs mobile development: how control navigation flow

Question

I am a nodejs newbie and would like to understand the navigation flow when using nodejs to serve mobile applications.

Moible app

index.html

  <a href = "http://localhost:3000/users">Show all users</a>

Nodejs server snippit

var myData = {
"employees": [
{ "firstName":"John" , "lastName":"Doe" }, 
{ "firstName":"Anna" , "lastName":"Smith" }, 
{ "firstName":"Peter" , "lastName":"Jones" }
]
};

res.send(myData);

Question: how do I display this data on another page (users.html)? I've worked with nodejs where I can just render to a specific path and it picks the appropriate Jade file but not sure how to do it since the html / js files are on the phone and not the server.

If you know of an example application I can just look through that code and figure it out.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

First of all you need to understand that your node.js is executed on server side, and all it can do - response on requests and do some logic, that stays on the server.

Then there is .html and .js that is sent to your clients (browser), and it is rendered and executed on client-side. This execution and logic is very different, and is focused to provide user interactions and render all sorts of data.

So all you need is be able to 'ask' server for data (request) and then get response, validate it in browser, if it is valid, you can render it using JS.
In order to make your life easier, consider using jQuery.

AJAX - to make requests to server and get response with data.
express.js - web framework for node, helps with routes.
And just generally - go and try things, experiment and it is better to understand whole picture or specific details frist, before you making any decisions.