Application Inventory

So far, we’ve spent all of our time on the backend service that manages products in our catalog. We were lucky because we could focus our exploration on a single API, the Catalog context.

In the LiveView, we’re not so lucky. There are nearly a dozen files that we need to worry about. It would be nice to start with a common interface for our user-facing features.

It turns out we do have such an interface, but it’s not an Elixir API. Instead, it’s a list of the routes a user can access. That’s right, the routes in pento/lib/pento_web/router.ex are an API.

Let’s take a look at the LiveView routes we generated in the last few lessons.

How to route the LiveViews

The router tells us all of the things a user can do with products. It represents a high-level overview of how each piece of CRUD functionality is backed by LiveView. Let’s take a look at the routes we added to our application’s router after we ran the generator in the previous lessons. We’ll break down how Phoenix routes requests to a LiveView and how LiveView operates on those requests.

That’s exactly the API we’re looking for. This list of routes describes all of the ways a user can interact with products in our application. Each of these routes starts with a macro defining the type of request, followed by three options. All of our routes are live routes, defined ...