Make "/" and "" equal the same thing

[timkindberg]

Sounds like everyone is on board with this. Make the use of "/" equivalent to using "" (empty quotes). See #174 (comment)

[nateabele]

👍

[ksperling]

I suppose this should happen inside urlRouter. We currently simply pass the $location object into the matcher functions; maybe we need to change this to pass (path, $location), where path has pre-processing like "" -> "/" applied.

I don't really like how $urlRouter has been changed to using $injector.invoke either; I don't disagree that having callbacks injectable is a good idea, but I think there's a better way to do that rather than using $injector.invoke everywhere.

I'm looking at implementing $injector.bind(fn) to do something similar to Function.prototype.bind(), i.e. return a new function object where injectable parameters are already bound instead of having to be looked up on every call. Additionally you'd be able to call $injector.bind() during the config phase, and get a bound function returned immediately, but invoking the function will fail until runtime when the injectables have actually been bound.

[aaronleesmith]

Is this issue referring to the fact that URLs ending in '/' don't route correctly?

If not, I opened issue #205 to address this issue.

[timkindberg]

I was gonna mess around with this one, to see if I could fix it, but I'm finding that I can't even get the current method working. If you have a parent with url of "/parent" and a child with url of "" (empty quotes) is the child supposed to be activated along with the parent when navigated to "/parent" in address bar?

Plunkr showing the issue: http://plnkr.co/edit/9VBBiC?p=preview

[ksperling]

@timkindberg having the child state URL be the same as the parent url (by appending '') really only works if the parent is abstract.

I think for the "" vs "/" thing the correct fix is to change UrMatcher to silently treat $location.path() == "/" as if it was "". (I think doing it this way around as opposed to treating '' as '/' is more symmetrical with how the default child of any other abstract parent also uses '')

[ksperling]

In addition, compiling an (absolute) pattern of "/" into an URLMatchers should just silently return a UrlMatcher for "" (which will then match both "" and "/").

Actually that makes me think it should be the other way around... compiling an (absolute) "" UrlMatcher will give you "/" instead, which silently also matches "", but .format() will return "/" so that generated URLs are still correct.

[nelsonpecora]

I think there should be two config options:

• "fudge urls" (or whatever it's called) - when this is on, things like "/" and "", "/foo" and "/FOO", and such will route the same
• "trailing slash" - this is only applied if the first option is true. when it's on, non-trailing-slash routes get a trailing slash, and when it's off trailing slashes are removed

These two options would cover all of the functionality that vanilla ngRoute has in this regard, without forcing a certain URL style (for example, the app I'm building requires trailing slashes in the urls, and some people want to use case-sensitive routes).

[timkindberg]

I'm fine with those two options if anyone wants to submit a PR.

[nelsonpecora]

I'm going to dive into the code this weekend and see if I can get this working.

EDIT: Fleshing out this idea, how does this sound?

$stateProvider.trailingSlash(); // true: add slash, false: remove slash (if you don't call this method, there's no trailing slash fudging)
$stateProvider.lowerCaseUrls(); // true: make urls lowercase
$stateProvider.upperCaseUrls(); // true: make urls uppercase (whichever one comes latest gets set, if none are called there is no case fudging)

[timkindberg]

So the case insensitive stuff was just added: #957

Only the trailing slash would be needed now. And it would be part of UrlMatcher just like the PR linked above, since all url matching happens there. Or at least not part of $stateProvider.