Improvements Coming for Routing in Angular

A little more than a month ago, we introduced a new router at ng-conf. We hoped this would finally resolve the outstanding routing issues in our first design.

It turns out, routing is hard.

We’re grateful to have heard from many folks at ng-conf about flaws in this new design, so we are announcing version 3.0.0-alpha.3 of @angular/router and are deprecating version 2. You should begin using this router right away.

This router was built together with the @ngrx team. This router breaks compatibility with version 2 of @angular/router, but we believe it is a worthwhile successor to version 2 as well as to ngrx’s router.

Version 3.0

While the new version 3.0 of the router needs community validation and field-testing, we intend for this to become the primary router used by Angular applications. This router takes cues from both @ngrx/router router and UI-Router (a huge thank you to Chris for his work, he’s been working to make his ready for Angular 2).

What do I need to know?

1. Route configuration is now specified independently of components
2. Most [RouterLink] directives you have today will keep working
3. The version 3 router is ready to use, and more capabilities are coming
4. Read about the new router today in Victor Savkin’s Full Writeup on Routing
5. Official Documentation will be launched in the next two weeks

Get started by checking out this plunker, stay tuned for more about this Router, and the upcoming Angular 2 RC2.

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Some backstory for the curious

During the alpha and beta periods of Angular 2, we developed a router (@angular/router-deprecated) that worked fine for many use cases, but had some fundamental problems. Deep linking into lazy loaded sections couldn’t work, our lifecycle hooks used for things like authentication were not compatible with DI, and it was impossible to inspect the whole router tree from a particular routable component.

To resolve these fundamental incompatibilities, in April we began work on a second version of the router (@angular/router 2.0) and rapidly released it as an incremental improvement at the ng-conf conference. Thanks to your input, we know that this new approach did not completely resolve the issues that set us down this path, so we went back to the drawing board and brought in more external collaborators. This path lead us to the latest version of the router we are announcing today.