You can benefit from Vue Router’s capabilities while structuring your routes with a Quasar Layout. The information below is just a recommendation and not mandatory to follow. Quasar allows you full freedom. Take the lines below only as an example.

QLayout is the component used to encapsulate pages, so that multiple pages will share the same header, drawers and so on. However, you can also configure per page header/footer/drawers, but they all must be children of the QLayout component. In order to understand how this works, you need a little bit of reading on Vue Router nested routes.

To make it more clear, let’s take an example. We have one layout (‘user’) and two pages (‘user-feed’ and ‘user-profile’). We want to configure the website/app routes like this: /user/feed and /user/profile.

Creating Files

Quasar does not enforce a specific folder structure. The following is just an example. You can put layouts and pages together in a folder, or put pages in your specific folder structure of choice, or create your own layout and page folders. It doesn’t matter for Quasar. All that matters is that you reference them correctly in /src/router/routes.js.

Let’s create the layout and page files. You can use a helper command of Quasar CLI or simply create them yourself.

$ quasar new layout User
 app:new Generated layout: src/layouts/User.vue +0ms
 app:new Make sure to reference it in src/router/routes.js +2ms

$ quasar new page Profile Posts
 app:new Generated page: src/pages/Profile.vue +0ms
 app:new Make sure to reference it in src/router/routes.js +2ms

 app:new Generated page: src/pages/Posts.vue +1ms
 app:new Make sure to reference it in src/router/routes.js +0ms

The commands above create the following folder structure:

src/
├── layouts
│   └── User.vue         # our QLayout definition
└── pages
    ├── Posts.vue        # page for /user/feed route
    └── Profile.vue      # page for /user/profile route

Defining Routes

Your Pages (/src/pages) and Layouts (/src/layouts) are injected into your website/app (and also managed) through Vue Router in /src/router/routes.js. Each Page and Layout needs to be referenced there.

Example of routes.js using lazy-loading:

// we define our routes in this file

import LandingPage from 'pages/Landing'

const routes = [
  {
    path: '/',
    component: LandingPage
  }
]

export default routes

Example of routes.js using on-demand loading:

// we define our routes in this file

const routes = [
  {
    path: '/',
    component: () => import('pages/Landing')
  }
]

export default routes

Nested Routes

Real app UIs are usually composed of components that are nested multiple levels deep. It is also very common that the segments of a URL corresponds to a certain structure of nested components, for example:

/user/profile                   /user/posts
+------------------+            +-----------------+
| User             |            | User            |
| +--------------+ |            | +-------------+ |
| | Profile      | |  +------>  | | Posts       | |
| |              | |            | |             | |
| +--------------+ |            | +-------------+ |
+------------------+            +-----------------+

With Vue Router, it is very simple to express this relationship using nested route configurations. We notice some things: both pages need to be wrapped by a User component. Hey, User component is then a Layout!

Since User layout wraps inner pages, they need an injection point. This is supplied by the <router-view> component:

<!-- /src/layouts/User.vue -->
<template>
  <q-layout>
    ...

    <!-- this is where the Pages are injected -->
    <q-page-container>
      <router-view></router-view>
    </q-page-container>

    ...
  </q-layout>
</template>

<!-- /src/pages/Profile.vue or Posts.vue -->
<template>
  <q-page>
    ...page content...
  </q-page>
</template>

Our example has some routes specified (/user/profile and /user/posts). So how can we put everything together now? We edit the routes file. That’s where we will configure routes, tell which components are Layouts and which are Pages and also reference/import them into our app:

// src/router/routes.js

import User from 'layouts/User'
import Profile from 'pages/Profile'
import Posts from 'pages/Posts'

const routes = [
  {
    path: '/user',

    // we use /src/layouts/User component which is imported above
    component: User,

    // hey, it has children routes and User has <router-view> in it;
    // It is really a Layout then!
    children: [
      // Profile page
      {
        path: 'profile', // here it is, route /user/profile
        component: Profile // we reference /src/pages/Profile.vue imported above
      },

      // Posts page
      {
        path: 'posts', // here it is, route /user/posts
        component: Posts // we reference /src/pages/Posts.vue imported above
      }
    ]
  }
]

export default routes

Our routes configuration (/src/router/routes.js) should look like this:

export default [
  {
    path: '/user',

    // We point it to our component
    // where we defined our QLayout
    component: () => import('layouts/user'),

    // Now we define the sub-routes.
    // These are getting injected into
    // layout (from above) automatically
    // by using <router-view> placeholder
    // (need to specify it in layout)
    children: [
      {
        path: 'feed',
        component: () => import('pages/user-feed')
      },
      {
        path: 'profile',
        component: () => import('pages/user-profile')
      }
    ]
  }
]

Please notice a few things:

• We are using lazy loading of layouts and pages (() => import(<path>)). If your website/app is small, then you can skip the lazy loading benefits as they could add more overhead than what it’s worth:

  import UserLayout from 'layouts/user'
  import UserFeed from 'pages/user-feed'
  import UserProfile from 'pages/user-profile'
  
  export default [
    path: '/user',
    component: UserLayout,
    children: [
      { path: 'feed', component: UserFeed },
      { path: 'profile', component: UserProfile }
    ]
  ]
  

• Quasar provides some out of the box Webpack aliases (‘layouts’ which points to ‘/src/layouts’ and ‘pages’ which points to ‘/src/pages’), which are used in the above examples.

• Pages of a Layout are declared as children of it in the Vue Router configuration so that <router-view/> will know what page component to inject. Remember to always use this Vue component whenever your Layout has pages attached to it.

  <q-layout>
    ...
    <q-page-container>
      <!--
        This is where your pages will get
        injected into your Layout
      -->
      <router-view />
    </q-page-container>
    ...
  </q-layout>