Deep linking allows you to encode the state of the application in the URL so that it can be bookmarked and the application can be restored from the URL to the same state.
While Angular does not force you to deal with bookmarks in any particular way, it has services which make the common case described here very easy to implement.
Assumptions
Your application consists of a single HTML page which bootstraps the application. We will refer to this page as the chrome. Your application is divided into several screens (or views) which the user can visit. For example, the home screen, settings screen, details screen, etc. For each of these screens, we would like to assign a URL so that it can be bookmarked and later restored. Each of these screens will be associated with a controller which define the screen's behavior. The most common case is that the screen will be constructed from an HTML snippet, which we will refer to as the partial. Screens can have multiple partials, but a single partial is the most common construct. This example makes the partial boundary visible using a blue line.
You can make a routing table which shows which URL maps to which partial view template and which controller.
Example
In this example we have a simple app which consist of two screens:
- Welcome: url
welcome
Show the user contact information. - Settings: url
settings
Show an edit screen for user contact information.
Source
Demo
Things to notice
- Routes are defined in the
AppCntl
class. The initialization of the controller causes the initialization of the $route service with the proper URL routes. - The $route service then watches the URL and instantiates the appropriate controller when the URL changes.
- The ngView widget loads the view when the URL changes. It also sets the view scope to the newly instantiated controller.
- Changing the URL is sufficient to change the controller and view. It makes no difference whether the URL is changed programmatically or by the user.