What is Angular Routing? A Complete Guide

Angular is a powerful and popular front-end framework for building dynamic and responsive web applications. One of its key features that contribute to its robustness is Angular Routing. Single Page Applications (SPAs) have become increasingly popular in modern web development due to their seamless user experience. Angular Routing plays a vital role in creating SPAs by enabling navigation between different views and components without needing page reloads. This blog on Angular Routing aims to clarify the concepts, principles, and best practices surrounding this essential feature. 

Table of Contents 

1) Understanding AngularJS 

2) What is Angular Routing? 

3) Getting started with Angular Routing 

4) Defining Routes and navigation 

5) Route parameters and data 

6) Conclusion 

Understanding AngularJS 

AngularJS is a crucial front-end JavaScript framework that revolutionised web development by simplifying the creation of dynamic web applications. AngularJS employs the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture at its core, facilitating a clear separation of concerns.  

The framework enables developers to create reusable components and extend HTML syntax, enhancing code readability and maintainability. Data binding, a fundamental feature, ensures automatic synchronisation between the model and view, reducing boilerplate code and improving application performance.  

Additionally, AngularJS provides robust routing capabilities, allowing the development of Single-Page Applications (SPAs) with seamless navigation. Developers can also leverage various AngularJS Development Tools to streamline coding, debugging, and performance optimisation.

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What is Angular Routing? 

Now that we have a fair understanding of AngularJS, let us explore Angular Routing in detail. 

a) The core concept: Angular Routing is a mechanism that enables navigation between different components or views within a Single-Page Application (SPA) without requiring a full page reload. It achieves this by mapping specific URLs to corresponding components. 

b) Seamless navigation: When users interact with the application, Angular Routing automatically updates the view based on the URL, providing a smooth and interactive user experience. 

c) Multi-page experience: Angular Routing allows developers to create a multi-page feel by dynamically loading components based on the user's navigation choices. 

d) Managing application states: Routing helps manage complex application states, ensuring users can access specific views or states via URLs. This makes it easier to handle user interactions and enables easy sharing of specific application states. 

e) Advanced features: Angular Routing supports various advanced features like route parameters, allowing the passing of data through URLs; route guards for implementing authentication and authorisation logic; lazy loading of modules, optimising performance by loading components on-demand; and nested routes, enabling hierarchical structuring of components. 

f) Single-page advantage: Angular applications can maintain a single-page architecture using routing while offering traditional multi-page applications flexibility and user experience. 

g) Enhancing user engagement: Seamless navigation and faster transitions between views improve user engagement and satisfaction. 

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Getting started with Angular Routing 

Follow these steps to set up Angular projects and configure Routes: 

Setting up a new Angular project 

Before diving into Angular Routing, ensure you have an Angular project set up. If you don't have one, you can create a new Angular project using the Angular CLI with the following command: 

ng new my-angular-app 

Installing Angular Router 

Angular Router is a built-in module that handles routing in Angular applications. To install it, run the following command:

npm install @angular/router 

Configuring routes 

After installing Angular Router, you need to configure the routes for your application. Create a new file, typically named 'app-routing.module.ts', and import the necessary modules: 

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core'; 

import { RouterModule, Routes } from '@angular/router'; 

Defining routes 

Define your routes using the 'Routes' array. Each route is an object containing a 'path' (URL), the corresponding 'component', and an optional 'data' property for additional information. 

const routes: Routes = [ 

  { path: '', component: HomeComponent }, 

  { path: 'about', component: AboutComponent }, 

  { path: 'contact', component: ContactComponent }, 

  // Add more routes as needed 

]; 

Router outlet and router link 

In your main 'app.component.html', add a '' tag where the routed components will be displayed. Use the " tag with the 'routerLink' attribute to navigate between components. 

will be displayed. Use the '' tag with the 'routerLink' attribute to navigate between components.

 

Navigating between components 

With the 'routerLink' set up, clicking the links will automatically navigate to the corresponding components without reloading a full page. 

Route parameters 

You can run parameters in the URL to dynamically load data into components. Define route parameters using a colon (':') followed by the parameter name in the 'path'. 

{ path: 'product/:id', component: ProductDetailComponent }, 

Extracting Route parameters 

To access route parameters in your component, use the 'ActivatedRoute' service. 

import { ActivatedRoute } from '@angular/router'; 

// Inside your component: 

constructor(private route: ActivatedRoute) { 

  this.route.params.subscribe(params => { 

    const productId = params['id']; 

    // Fetch data based on the productId 

  }); 

} 

Handling 404 page 

To handle unknown URLs or 404 pages, define a wildcard route at the end of the routes array. 

{ path: '**', component: NotFoundComponent }, 

Nested Routing 

You can create child routes and nested routing to organise complex application structures. 

{ path: 'products', component: ProductListComponent, children: [ 

  { path: 'details/:id', component: ProductDetailComponent }, 

  // Other child routes 

]}, 

You can start with Angular Routing in your application by following these steps and examples. 

Defining routes and navigation 

The following points will help you gain clarity on defining routes and navigation in Angular: 

Creating routes in Angular 

a) Defining routes is a crucial step in Angular Routing. Routes are defined as an array of objects, each representing a specific route in the application. 

b) Each route object contains two essential properties: 'path' and 'component'. The 'path' represents the URL associated with the 'component', while the component specifies the Angular component that should be loaded when the URL matches the path. 

For example, suppose we have two components, 'HomeComponent' and 'AboutComponent'. The route configuration for these components would look like this: 

const routes: Routes = [ 

  { path: '', component: HomeComponent }, 

  { path: 'about', component: AboutComponent }, 

]; 

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Router outlet and router link 

Now, let's understand router outlet and router link: 

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Lazy loading modules with routing 

Lazy loading is a technique that loads specific modules only when needed, reducing the initial loading time of your application. Angular Routing makes it easy to implement lazy loading by using the 'loadChildren' property in the route configuration. 

To lazy load a module, provide the path to the module file using the 'loadChildren' property: 

{ path: 'admin', loadChildren: () => import('./admin/admin.module').then(m => m.AdminModule) }, 

In this example, the ‘AdminModule’ will only be loaded when the user navigates to the ‘/admin’ route. 

Defining routes and navigation is fundamental to Angular Routing, enabling developers to build dynamic and interactive Single Page Applications. Developers can do this by configuring routes, handling route parameters, implementing redirections, using route guards, and exploring advanced features like lazy loading. 

Route parameters and data 

Angular Routing relies on route parameters and data to create dynamic web experiences. These features enable personalised content and data-driven interactions for enhanced user engagement and interactivity. Let us look at some of these features: 

a) Passing data through URLs: Route parameters allow developers to pass data between different components within an Angular application through the URL. This is useful when components need specific information to display or fetch data from a server. 

b) Defining Route parameters: Route parameters are defined in the route configuration using a colon (':') followed by the parameter name in the 'path' property. The parameter value will be extracted from the URL when the route is activated. 

c) Accessing Route parameters: To access the route parameters within a component, developers can use the 'ActivatedRoute' service provided by Angular's '@angular/router module'. The 'ActivatedRoute' provides access to the current route's parameters through the 'params' observable. 

d)  Dynamic components: Route parameters enable the creation of dynamic components by allowing users to access different resources or data based on the parameter values. For example, in an e-commerce application, route parameters can be used to display specific product details. 

e) Linking to specific resources: By embedding parameter values in the URL, developers can create shareable links that directly point to specific resources or pages within the application. This is beneficial for bookmarking or sharing content with others. 

f) Extracting parameters: Once the route is activated and the component is loaded, developers can extract the route parameters from the 'params' observable. The parameters are typically accessed inside the component's constructor or in the 'ngOnInit' lifecycle hook. 

g) Handling undefined parameters: When handling route parameters, developers should account for scenarios where parameters might be missing or undefined. Proper error handling ensures the application behaves gracefully and provides a good user experience. 

h) Resolving data before navigation: In addition to route parameters, Angular Routing also allows developers to resolve data before activating a route. Data resolvers are services that fetch data from a server or perform other tasks before the route is activated, ensuring the necessary data is available when the component loads. 

i) Dynamically loading data: By using route resolvers, developers can dynamically load data and provide it to components seamlessly. This approach avoids displaying empty or incomplete components while waiting for data to load asynchronously.
 

 

Conclusion 

Understanding What is Routing in Angular is essential for building modern Single-Page Applications with seamless navigation and dynamic content. One of the advantages of AngularJS is its powerful routing capabilities, which enable developers to create engaging user experiences and efficiently manage application states and route parameters. Embracing this powerful feature empowers developers to deliver robust and user-friendly web applications.