Coding | Lok's Notes

Ah routing! Today, I’ll attempt to explain how to do routing in Angular with simple English. You don’t need to read the whole blog post. Just pick and choose from the topics below. After getting things working, you can come back and read the rest if you want.

Please note that I didn’t include the import statement of all of the components. Please add them accordingly.

Topics:

Simple Routes – Flat routes for a few pages at the same level
Create a Routing Module – Put all the routes into a single route file
Nested Routes – Manage child routes

1. Simple Routes

Imagine we want to create an application with only 3 pages: Home, Product Category, and Shipping Policy.

In the app.module.ts:

That’s simple. From lines 1-10, we defined all the routes in a constant object called appRoutes. As you see, the /home route is mapped to the HomeComponent, the /product-categories route is mapped to the ProductCategoriesComponent, etc. Then, we configured the RouterModule with a static method called forRoot with the appRoutes object.

2. Create a Routing Module

This step extracts the code related to routing from the AppModule to AppRoutingModule, a separate file. The whole reason for doing this is to decouple the code. It’s easier to manage route-related code and application module separately.

Create a new file for routing. You can call it whatever you like. I’m going to name it app-routing.module.ts

Don’t forget the put RouterModule in the exports array(line 21). This will re-export the RouterModule that we just configured on line 20. Any module that imports this AppRoutingModule gets access to the RouterModule.

Now we can simplify the AppModule(app.module.ts) as the following:

Much cleaner than the one in the example of Simple Routes, right?

3. Nested Routes

What if now you don’t want to keep all the Product Categories on the same page? You want to add some sub-pages to the /product-categories route for different categories. Of course, you have to create new components. i.e. CategoryOneComponent and CategoryTwoComponent.

Then add them to the AppRoutingModule as the following code on lines 5 to 8. The children array indicates all the sub-route for the /product-categories route. The path of the empty string(line 6) is to set the default sub-path when the sub-path is not indicated.

For example, if the user enters

https://myexample.com/product-categories

Thanks to line 6, s/he will be redirected to

https://myexample.com/product-categories/category-one

Now, the ProductCategoriesComponent has to act as a placeholder for CategoryOneComponent or CategoryTwoComponent. In product-categories.component.html, we need to add the router-outlet tag. So the content can be substituted by one of the two children.

That’s how you do nested routes in Angular. I know it’s a little confusing. Leave me a message if you have a question.

Check out my other post about constructing an Angular Post Request.

If my note helped, please consider buying me a coffee😁.

Cheers,
Lok

creative internet computer display — Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com

The construction of a POST request in Angular is simple. But I’ve probably searched too many times on how to do it because I can memorize the syntax. It’s time to put down some notes. I’m going to go through how to add a header, create a body and add parameters to a POST request in Angular.

1. Inject HttpClient

We need the HttpClient to perform a POST request in Angular. It handles a lot of things for you so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. To do this, simply add a private parameter in the constructor of your component or service:

constructor(private http: HttpClient)

2. Create HttpHeaders

You can simply create an HttpHeaders object. Then append header names and values to it. For example:

const headers = new HttpHeaders()
    .append(
      'Content-Type',
      'application/json'
    );

3. Create Body

Technically, you can send any data type in the body. But most of the time I would convert an object to a JSON string. You can specify the content-type in the headers.

const body=JSON.stringify(myObject);

4. Create HttpParams

You can make a POST request with multiple parameters. To do that, create a new HttpParams object and append the desired parameters to it.

const params = new HttpParams()
      .append('param1', 'some data 1')
      .append('param2', 'some data 2');

5. Make a POST request

After building the headers, body, and parameters, you can make a POST request with the following code. You don’t have to provide all the things above. For example, if your API doesn’t care about the body, you can leave it as an empty string.

this.http
      .post<any>('https://api-example.com', body, {
        headers: headers,
        params: params,
      })
      .subscribe((res) => console.log(res));

That’s it. Happy coding! 🙂

If my note helped, please consider buying me a coffee😁.

Lok