There are plenty of examples and documentation about the Angular router, but these things sometimes leave important questions unaddressed. Documentation often intentionally demures from questions like “what is the best way to use this?”. Even my own previous post briefly reintroducing the router does the same.

Here are our recommendations from extensive use (at Oasis Digital, in classes and complex customer applications), with my specific take on contentious points, on that category of Routing question. How can the built-in capabilities of Angular, including the router, be used with maximum leverage? How can an application be written “with the grain” of Angular to produce the greatest value with the least code? How can the router be used to provide a good user experience and functionality?

URL/route for navigational state

The standard use of intra-application URLs is to represent and control navigational state. Navigational state means “where” the user is in the application. Which screen; which entity; what they are working on; what they are looking at. This type of state so strongly belongs in the URL that (in a polished, important application) it should always be managed via the router -even if some other state mechanism is being used to manage other aspects of application state.

Pop-ups and auxiliary routes

The Angular router has an auxiliary route feature, uncommon among other routers for other frameworks. This feature has various uses, particularly for (unusual) applications with more than one section of the screen that might be navigated separately. But it also has a common use: if an application has a pop-up/popover/dialogue of some kind (for example, a list of users in which editing a user happens on the same screen), the state of whether a pop-up is currently visible should be represented as an auxiliary route.

Resist the temptation to have a pop-up work separately from the route, because that would mean that bookmarking or sharing a URL would not capture this aspect of the user’s navigational state.

Router state and form state

Sometimes a form is used for data entry; for these cases the state of the form (particularly if you’re using model driven/reactive forms) is a fine place to keep that interim data entry state.

But in other cases, a form is used for something like a faceted search. Search parameters can easily stray into navigational state. For example, if the user is currently searching a list of orders for a certain date range that mention a certain product, they could very reasonably want to navigate forward and back to that state, they could want to bookmark and share the URL, and have those search parameters come along.

In these cases, it is reasonable to mutually interconnect the router state and the state of a form. That sounds difficult, but requires just a few lines of code. The result can easily provide a near ideal user experience around searching, URLs, the back button, bookmarks, and so on.

Router state and ngrx/Store

Ngrx/Store users have some extra tools at their disposal around the router state. There is an optional add-on package which integrates router state into Store state, so that it can be managed via the same mechanisms (actions, reducers, effects, etc. An application of significant complexity, so much so that it needs Store, almost certainly also has significant navigational state, and should strongly consider integrating them together.

Don’t fear ugly URL parameters

In simple cases, a URL contains a flat name-value pair list of optional parameters, in which the contents of such strings are most typically just a single value, it is also acceptable to pack in many values in such a single parameter by encoding a broader swath of state as JSON. For example, consider a simple search of orders in the system for order management. It might have single search parameter, perhaps which matches a product description. The URL for the state of searching for such a description could look like:

/orders/search?productMatch=blue

But for a more complex search (for example think of a faceted search with 15 different fields by which the user could search for old orders), you may need more (bug-hiding) code to shuffle search parameters into and out of URL parameters. It is also acceptable, and sometimes more advisable, to encode all of the complex search parameters like so:

/orders/search?q=...

where … Represents a URL-encoded JSON object describing the search parameters

Such a URL is less straightforward to inspect by hand, but also less work to manipulate programmatically and easier to expand to encompass more parameters. Make the trade-off at the application level, as to whether this yields a better overall system.

Router security concerns

I’ve seen suggestions of route guards is a security mechanism; but it’s important to remember that the entire browser is a user agent, it is literally an agent of the user, not the agent of the developer or of the backend system. At best a browser application can avoid making security worse, but it doesn’t actually provide security. Never assume that route guards or other client-side mechanisms are providing any real security, rather think of these mechanisms as advisory security. Advisory security is UX/UI which makes it easier for the user to avoid wandering into a screen which will break because server-side security rules interfere with its operation.

But there is a new and interesting way that browser-based applications can get things wrong with security where the router is concerned. The entire route URL, which means all route segments, parameters, outlets, etc. is untrusted user input. It could accidentally or intentionally contain errant or malicious data. Make sure to treat route data as such, sanitizing it etc. as one would any other user input.

Matrix parameters

Although not used very widely, there is a URL pattern called a matrix parameter, in which each “segment” of the URL has its own parameters rather than just one single bucket of parameters for the entire URL. The Angular router supports this nicely, by using it you can sometimes conserve application code quite significantly while still providing a more ideal user experience around navigational state captured in the URL.

Route guards for data loading

Longtime Angular users who started with AngularJS often point back to the “route resolve” feature is a critical capability they’re looking for an Angular. The Resolve feature makes it possible to delay (or cancel/fail) loading of a route until the data needed to populate the screen for the route is ready.

I recommend using this feature with caution and sparingly. Often a better user experience can be achieved by proceeding directly to a route (for example, a customer history detail display), and then asynchronously loading various parts of the data which appear on that screen. While the screen painting can be a bit messier this way, the user will perceive that the screen started loading much more quickly than if loading is delayed until all data is available. Even if the difference is only a few hundred milliseconds, showing the user partial results is typically a better default.