Angular2 Routing: persisting route tabs and child routes

Question

Angular Community!

I'm currently rewriting AngularJS app to Angular 2. I want to solve problem which could be described as: route tabs + child routes.

So, basically Router in Angular 2 destroys inactive components (my tabs!). The problem is I don't want this behaviour. Reason is I have some components like charts and data grid and want to switch between them fast, I don't want to recreate them.

I have found some workaround to persist my tabs while having routes but using this approach I don't know how to implement child routes. I'd like to also have a solution depth-independent (meaning: working more levels deeper) because I have more subtabs that need to be persisted.

The workaround is: I have put some empty component to routes and instantiate tabs myself hiding them with [hidden] property:

app.ts:

@Component({ /*...*/ })
@RouteConfig([
    {path: '/**', redirectTo: ['Dashboard']},

    {path: '/dashboard', name: 'Dashboard', component: EmptyRoute},
    {path: '/products/...', name: 'Products', component: EmptyRoute},
    {path: '/sales', name: 'Sales', component: EmptyRoute},
    {path: '/reports', name: 'Reports', component: EmptyRoute},
])
export class App {
    constructor(private router: Router) {
    }

    public isRouteActive(route) {
        return this.router.isRouteActive(this.router.generate(route))
    }
}

app.html:

<dashboard [hidden]="!isRouteActive(['/Dashboard'])"></dashboard>
<products-management [hidden]="!isRouteActive(['/Products'])"></products-management>
<sales [hidden]="!isRouteActive(['/Sales'])"></sales>
<reports [hidden]="!isRouteActive(['/Reports'])"></reports>

Answer 1

I understand you have two different questions:

1- How to prevent the destruction of the component when you leave it. 2- implementing child routes.

1) For now Angular doesn't have convenient way to do this. We would apreciate it if they were a life cycle hook called like canDestroy().

Anyway you can do this either using non routable tabs OR just store your data on a higher component that doesn't get destroyed.

2) For the child routes I'll just put 2 examples:

Ex1: regular child routing

const AdminRoutes: Routes = [
{
  path: '',
  component: AdminComponent,
  children: [
    {
      path: 'users',
      component: UsersComponent,
      children: [
        { path: 'acces',  component: AccesComponent, data: { preload: true} },
        { path: 'roles',  component: RolesComponent, data: { preload: true} },
        { path: '',   redirectTo: '/admin/users/acces', pathMatch: 'full' },
        { path: '**', redirectTo: '/admin/users/acces', pathMatch: 'full' },
      ],
      data: { preload: true}
    },
    { path: '',   redirectTo: '/login', pathMatch: 'full' },
    { path: '**', redirectTo: '/login', pathMatch: 'full' }
  ]
},

EX2: When the child routes belongs to another module

Code for higher module

`

    const appRoutes: Routes = [
  { path: 'login',  component: LoginComponent, data: { preload: true} },
  {
    path: 'admin',
    loadChildren: 'app/modules/admin/admin.module#AdminModule',
    canActivate: [AuthGuardService],
    data: { preload: true}
  },
  { path: '',   redirectTo: '/login', pathMatch: 'full' },
  { path: '**', redirectTo: '/login', pathMatch: 'full' }

`

Code for child routes in their own module

`

const AdminRoutes: Routes = [
{
  path: '',
  component: AdminComponent,
  children: [
    {
      path: 'users',
      component: UsersComponent,
      children: [
        { path: 'acces',  component: AccesComponent, data: { preload: true} },
        { path: 'roles',  component: RolesComponent, data: { preload: true} },
        { path: '',   redirectTo: '/admin/users/acces', pathMatch: 'full' },
        { path: '**', redirectTo: '/admin/users/acces', pathMatch: 'full' },
      ],
      data: { preload: true}
    },
    { path: '',   redirectTo: '/login', pathMatch: 'full' },
    { path: '**', redirectTo: '/login', pathMatch: 'full' }
  ]
},

`