Ok, I've managed to find a solution working with current stable version (@1.0.7).
Current way of handling this problem will involve $route-related events, parsing angular-incompatible urls on the fly and handling them via an additional service working in a similar way as $http interception.
You can see working code examples here: http://embed.plnkr.co/fIA2xj/preview
Main steps
- pass an angular-incompatible url as usual, eg. go to site.com/url/http://site.com
- listen to a $routeChangeStart event and extract correct url parameter for paths beginning with
/url/
- encode the correct url parameter to an angular-compatible form (in this particular case, I use base64). Don't use encodeURIComponent, because angular will treat as any other url
- redirect to another route with your business logic, eg. site.com/parsed-url/BASE64_GOES_HERE
- decode the URL in the controller and use it as usual :)
Code
Create angular app module as usual
angular.module('routes',[]).config([
'$routeProvider',
function($routeProvider){
$routeProvider
.when('/test', {templateUrl: 'test.html'})
// This one is important:
// We define a route that will be used internally and handle
// parameters with urls parsed by us via the URLInterceptor service
.when('/parsed-url/:url', {templateUrl: 'url.html', controller:'URLCtrl'})
.when('/', {redirectTo: '/test'})
.otherwise({templateUrl: '404.html'});
}
])
URL Interceptor service (singleton)
.service('URLInterceptor', function($rootScope, $location){
// We listen to $routeChangeStart event and intercept it if
// the path matches our url scheme. In this case, every route
// beginning with /url/ will be caught
$rootScope.$on('$routeChangeStart', function(e, next, current){
// $location.path does change BEFORE actual routing happens,
// so in this case we get parsed new location object
// for free.
// To be hones, a better way of handling this case might be using
// $locationChangeStart event instead, but it would require us to parse urls
// manually.
var path = $location.path();
// check if string begins with '/url/'
var matcher = path.slice(0,5);
var cleanPath = '';
if (matcher === '/url/'){
// Yes it does, yay!
// Remove leading '/url/' to extract the actual parameter
cleanPath = path.slice(5);
// Encode our url to a safe version. We know that encodeURIComponent won't
// work either, so a good choice might be base64.
// I'm using https://code.google.com/p/javascriptbase64/downloads
$location.path('/parsed-url/' + Base64.encode(cleanPath));
// Prevent default event execution. Note that, it won't cancel related $location Events
e.preventDefault();
}
});
return {
decode: Base64.decode,
encode: Base64.encode
}
})
Controllers
// Main application controller
// We instantiate our URLInterceptor service here
.controller('AppCtrl',function($scope, $location, URLInterceptor){
$scope.navigateTo = function (path) {
$location.path('/url/' + path);
}
})
.controller('URLCtrl', function($scope, $routeParams, URLInterceptor){
$scope.url = URLInterceptor.decode($routeParams.url);
});
Two things you should remember:
- Although I tried to create a solution as clean as possible, usually passing the data this way to angular isn't considered a good practice, so try not to use it unless you really need to.
- You can handle this issue with only one route. I just find it cleaner this way.
