Book Image

Angular Router

By : Victor Savkin
Book Image

Angular Router

By: Victor Savkin

Overview of this book

Managing state transitions is one of the hardest parts of building applications. This is especially true on the web, where you also need to ensure that the state is reflected in the URL. In addition, you might want to split applications into multiple bundles and load them on demand. Doing this transparently isn’t easy. The Angular router solves these problems. Using the router, you can declaratively specify application states, manage state transitions while taking care of the URL, and load bundles on demand. This book is a complete description of the Angular router written by its designer. It goes far beyond a how-to-get-started guide and talks about the library in depth. The mental model, design constraints, and the subtleties of the API-everything is covered. You’ll learn in detail how to use the router in your own applications. Predominantly, you’ll understand the inner workings of the router and how you can configure it to work with any edge cases you come across in your sites. Throughout the book, you’ll see examples from real-world use in the MailApp application. You can view the full source of this application and see how the router code works to manage the state of the application and define what is visible on screen. Reading this book will give you deep insights into why the router works the way it does and will make you an Angular router expert.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Angular Router
Credits
About the Author
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Recognizing states


Next, the router will derive a router state from the URL. To understand how this phase works, we need to learn a bit about how the router matches the URL.

The router goes through the array of routes, one by one, checking if the URL starts with a route's path. Here it will check that /inbox/33/messages/44 starts with :folder. It does, since :folder is what is called a variable segment. It is a parameter where normally you'd expect to find a constant string. Since it is a variable, virtually any string will match it. In our case inbox will match it. So the router will set the folder parameter to inbox, then it will take the children configuration items, the rest of the URL 33/messages/44, and will carry on matching. As a result, the id parameter will be set to 33, and, finally, the messages/:id route will be matched with the second id parameter set to 44.

If the taken path through the configuration does not "consume" the whole URL, the router backtracks to try an alternative...