Support for object literal routing parameters in Angular UI Router

Question

I've been using Angular UI Router with a current project and have introduced some compound form inputs that I'd like to use as parameters in URL building for my routes. Essentially, the models I would like to parameterize are object literals, and I'm curious to know if ui-router has any ability to represent these as URL parameters.

In other parts of our application we have represented compound parameters with dot notation, e.g. ?field1.a=&field1.b=&field1.c, and I know some PHP frameworks make use of an array notation, e.g. ?field1[a]=field1[b]=field1[c] for representing multiple form fields associated with a single model.

From what I can tell, angular ui-router doesn't support similar. We are using v0.2.8, and at ~L131 there is a normalization function that will coerce object literals to their [object Object] string representation. It is this value that appears in URLs built with this kind of parameter, e.g. ?field1=[object Object].

I have considered lumping all the relevant fields together as a single parameter with a JSON string value as a workaround, e.g. ?filter={"field1":{}, "field2":{}, ...}, but wanted to check in to see if anyone has a better solution.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You have good timing. Typed parameter support was just merged into ui-router master. It isn't part of the 0.2.10 release, but should be part of 0.3.0 release, which is a few weeks away. If you build your own copy of bleeding-edge master and use this functionality now, please submit feedback to the ui-router project!

Here's the pull request that got merged with typed parameter support: https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router/pull/1032

Read the docs regarding Type in https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router/blob/master/src/urlMatcherFactory.js#L583