Routes

There are 3,378 possible pathways to qualifications for education roles. A route is useful only when it matches an individual’s situation and ambition.

To help users navigate these possibilities, we built the route discovery tool:

Explore the Routes Tool

By answering four questions about their current situation and career ambitions, users receive an overview of the pathways that are relevant to them.

To power this functionality, the system uses four collections:

The questionnaire and the results logic rely on these collections in different ways. The following sections describe both parts of the system.

Build the questionnaire

The route_questions collection is relatively simple: it contains the four questions used by the route discovery tool.

The route_answers collection is more complex. The available answer options are dynamic, meaning that the answers shown depend on earlier selections made by the user.

For example:

• The role a user can select (question 2) depends on the type of school selected in question 1.
• The qualification a user wants to obtain (question 4) depends on the role selected in question 2.

Because of these dependencies, the questionnaire must be implemented dynamically.

An alternative approach is to fetch all route_answers at once and implement the conditional logic on the client side. This is the approach used in the Onderwijsloket application.

While this results in a slightly heavier initial request, it reduces subsequent API calls and provides a smoother user experience.

Return matching routes

After the user has answered all four questions, you can fetch the relevant routes using the routes collection.

const selectedAnswers = ["abc-123", "def-456", "ghi-789", "jkl-012"];
const data = directus.request(
  readItems("routes", {
    fields: [
      "id",
      "duration_in_months",
      "title",
      "path",
      {
        route_steps: [
          {
            route_steps_id: ["id", "short_title", "duration_in_months"]
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    filter: {
      requires_answers: {
        _none: {
          route_answers_id: {
            _nin: selectedAnswers
          }
        }
      }
    },
    sort: ["duration_in_months"]
  })
);

Each route in the routes collection contains a list of answers in the requires_answers field. These represent the answers a user must have selected for the route to be relevant.

filter: {
  requires_answers: {
    _none: {
      route_answers_id: {
            _nin: selectedAnswers,
      }
    }
  }
}

In simple terms, this means:

Only return routes where all required answers are included in the answers the user selected.

How it works in practice:

• After the user answers the four questions, their selections are stored in selectedAnswers.
• Each route has a set of required answers (requires_answers).
• The filter removes any route that requires an answer the user did not select.

Example:

• User selected answers: [A, B, C, D]
• Route requires: [A, C] → included
• Route requires: [A, E] → excluded, because the user didn’t select E.

This way the API only returns routes that match the user’s situation and ambitions based on the answers they provided.