Routing in Angular is a vital feature that facilitates the creation of dynamic, single-page applications (SPAs) by enabling seamless navigation between views without requiring a full page reload. As a modern front-end framework, Angular provides powerful and flexible tools for managing URL paths, allowing developers to craft intuitive and responsive user interfaces. Mastering Angular's routing system not only boosts the performance and responsiveness of applications but also enhances their maintainability and scalability, enabling sophisticated routing solutions tailored to diverse project needs.
Explore Router’s possibilities:
The article explores various aspects of Angular's routing system in depth, offering insights to help you understand its functionality and apply it effectively in your daily development tasks. Let’s quickly recap it.
Configuration techniques
Angular allows you to customize the router highly to work exactly as you wish.
- Routes definition - Routing shapes the structure of your application - make sure it’s convenient for users to navigate
- Lazy loading- This is the key optimization technique in Angular. Breaking an application code into smaller chunks and loading them asynchronously once needed reduces initial bundle size and improves performance.
- Route matcher - Do you need to support a fancy or customized URL in your application? After all, it’s also a source of truth for its state. Route matcher is a great solution that allows you to create your own matching logic if the default one is not enough
- Route Guards - We want to keep our data safe. Guards are checkpoints when traversing your application routes. It's an essential concept for enforcing access control.
- Setting up page title - Setting meaningful titles for routes increases user experience and positively affects SEO. It can be statically defined at the route level, but why don’t you go fancy and create TitleStrategy
- Defining provider for route - Dependency injection is a key concept in Angular. Providing dependency at the route level is a really useful technique making it available for the route’s component and its descendants
- Component Input Binding - This is a cool feature that improves developer experience. You can bind path params, query params, resolver results, and route data directly to component inputs
- Router configuration options - Here, we go into the details of how the Router should behave, like defining when it should update the browser URL
- Preloading strategy - Lazy loading is the key concept, but if you are sure in advance that the user will visit some core part, you can preload it and avoid unnecessary latency
- Scrolling Memory - improves user experience by restoring a scroll position after navigating back
- View Transition - Adds nice element transitions navigating between the pages without manually API configuration
- Navigation Error Handler - Safely navigate the user away if an error occurs
Utilizing routing in components
After getting through all this configuration stuff, it’s time to use it in action.
- Router Link - The most important directive to handle navigation in your components. It’s a bridge between user interaction events and routing mechanisms.
- Router Link Active - Making the user aware of where they are by applying special styles to elements is a job for this directive
- Router Outlet - Using this directive, you tell a component where it should display a deeper level of routes tree. Did you know you can independently display many subbranches on one page using named outlets?
Utility providers
These guys make your life easier.
- Router Service - Irreplaceable service when it comes to performing more complicated navigation logic
- Activated Route Service - The real treasury of knowledge about the currently visited route
- Url Serializer - You can write your custom logic of how URL should be parsed and serialized
- Route Reuse Strategy - Your custom strategy of storing and reusing components when the route is accessed again instead of destroying them
Read the full article - Angular Router – everything you need to know about
