[RFC] Provide `externalRouter` to Engines about ember-engines HOT 5 OPEN

Will this allow the engine router to route to external routes without the necessity of mapping external routes. Our app has a ton of routes. We use engines to share the same experience across multiple routes. Initially we started mapping external routes but this created a bit bloat in the code for little benefit as we do not use engines as a "separate app".

So back to the question will this allow us to

this.router.external.transitionTo('home.foo.bar')

where home.foo.bar is a route in the consuming (parent) app?

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Will this allow the engine router to route to external routes without the necessity of mapping external routes

It's not true Luis! As you can see on the proposal the routes continue to be declared on dependencies as externalRoutes.

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Thanks for keeping progress on the router moving, @villander.

I'm unclear on how this proposal intersects with:

Consider allowing an experimental build flag to allow usage of an alpha engine-specific router which we can iterate upon.

Are you seeing the proposal in this issue (i.e. router.external) as separate from the alpha router we discussed experimenting with?

My impression was that the alpha router would be used to experiment with all engine-specific routing concepts, including external routes.

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Are you seeing the proposal in this issue (i.e. router.external) as separate from the alpha router we discussed experimenting with?

No! it's the same, we going to release the engine-specific (i.e. route.external) with the build flag as an experimental feature. It's only a breakdown

@dgeb what I understood so far is that we going to use engine-specific including all external routes passed down to Engines. Since the engine-specific router, like the *External methods will have access only for externalRoutes as usual. Is that ok for you?

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No! it's the same, we going to release the engine-specific (i.e. route.external) with the build flag as an experimental feature. It's only a breakdown

Gotcha, thanks for clarifying.

So I think we really have two alternatives on the table for handling external routes:

A) The one described in this RFC, in which an external namespace on the router service contains alternative external-route-specific methods.

B) An external route helper (or perhaps just external: string prefix) for namespacing external routes that can be used directly with the engine's router service and the standard LinkTo helpers.

Perhaps the best path forward will be to fill out option B as an RFC similar to this one, and at the same time fill in any gaps here for option A. Hopefully, we'll then be in a good position to decide if one approach is clearly better. If so, we can implement that behind the experimental flag. If not, perhaps we implement them both for comparison purposes in separate branches and then decide?

It will be good to talk this over in our monthly meeting and hear from @rwjblue, @buschtoens, and others who are interested in this space.

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