It depends on your situation but if you don't care to preserve state after a page reload which localStorage
would be good for, but rather have the state be remembered just when you're going back (and not necessarily when you later navigate forward back into the view again) then I do this: I make a separate service, just an object that sticks around in which I can inject anywhere and store some variables. In Angular 1 this would be a service object.
angular.module('foo').factory("placeHelper", [
() => {
let _place = null;
class PlaceHelper {
set place(place){
_place = place;
}
get place(){
return _place;
}
reset(){
_place = null;
}
}
let helper = new PlaceHelper();
return helper;
}
]);
Then in your controller that you're going back to, you inject placeHelper and ask it for the place and restore your state via $scope.place = placeHelper.place
and when in the UI for that controller someone selects a place, you just store it in the service, placeHelper.place = $scope.place
.
I would use localStorage within the service if I wanted to keep the state around after a page refresh.
I don't like polluting $rootScope because it's harder to keep track after you start to have more than a few unrelated methods in there and your properties need to have longer names (or get grouped in objects anyway). It's better for maintainability to encapsulate and separate concerns.
Service variation:
The service could be an object literal instead of a class and you could directly set the properties instead of using methods if you wanted it to be a bit more simple.
angular.module('foo').factory("placeHelper", [
() => {
let helper = {
place: null,
reset(){
this.place = null;
}
};
return helper;
}
]);