angular 4 - routing within a component(child routes) not working properly

Question

I recently started learning angular4 and currently working on routing in angular. I followed angular routing docs and started implementing some simple functionality of child routing. And I am stuck with it. Below is my code. Can anybody please tell what am I doing wrong?

Dashboard module is imported into root module which has its own routes insite it. app/app.module.ts

import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';

import { AppRoutingModule } from './app-routing.module';
import { AppComponent } from './app.component';
import { PageNotFoundComponent } from './page-not-found/page-not-found.component';
import { DashboardModule } from './dashboard/dashboard.module';

@NgModule({
  declarations: [
    AppComponent,
    PageNotFoundComponent,
  ],
  imports: [
    BrowserModule,
    DashboardModule,
    AppRoutingModule,
  ],
  providers: [],
  bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})
export class AppModule { }

Root level routing module which has default route that redirects to dashboard compoent. app/app-routing.module.ts

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { Routes, RouterModule } from '@angular/router';
import { LoginComponent } from './login/login.component';
import { PageNotFoundComponent } from './page-not-found/page-not-found.component';

const routes: Routes = [
  {
    path: '',
    redirectTo: 'dashboard',
    pathMatch: 'full'
  },
  {
    path: 'dashboard',
    loadChildren: 'app/dashboard/dashboard.module#DashboardModule',
    data: {preload: true}
  },
  {
    path: 'login',
    component: LoginComponent,
  },
  {
    path: '**',
    component: PageNotFoundComponent
  }
];

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    RouterModule.forRoot(routes)
  ],
  exports: [RouterModule]
})
export class AppRoutingModule { }

This is the routing configuration for child routes present in dashboard module app/dashboard/dashboard-routing.ts

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { RouterModule, Route } from '@angular/router';
import { DispatchesComponent } from './dispatches/dispatches.component';
import { DashboardComponent } from './dashboard.component';
import { TransactionsComponent } from './transactions/transactions.component';

const dashBoardRoutes : Route[] = [
  {
    path: 'dashboard',
    component: DashboardComponent,
    pathMatch: 'full',
    children: [
      {
        path: 'dispatches',
        component: DispatchesComponent
      },
      {
        path: 'txns',
        component: TransactionsComponent
      },
      {
        path: '',
        component: DispatchesComponent,
        pathMatch: 'full'
      },
    ]
  },
]

@NgModule({
  imports: [
    RouterModule.forChild(dashBoardRoutes)
  ],
  declarations: [],
  exports: [
    RouterModule
  ]
})
export class DashboardRoutingModule { }

And finally I imported these routes into dashboard module app/dashboard/dashboard.module.ts

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { CommonModule } from '@angular/common';
import { DashboardComponent } from './dashboard.component';
import { RouterModule } from '@angular/router';
import { SharedModule } from './../shared/shared.module';
import { DashboardRoutingModule } from './dashboard-routing.module';
import { DispatchesModule } from './dispatches/dispatches.module';
import { TransactionsModule } from './transactions/transactions.module';


@NgModule({
  imports: [
    DispatchesModule,
    CommonModule,
    SharedModule,
    TransactionsModule,
    RouterModule,
    DashboardRoutingModule,
  ],
  declarations: [DashboardComponent]
})
export class DashboardModule { }

And here is html in dashboard component dashboard.component.html

<p>
  dashboard works!
</p>
<button routerLink="/login">Go to login</button>
<div>
   <app-sidebar></app-sidebar> 
</div>
<div class="dashboard-routes">
  <button routerLink="dispatches">dispatches</button>
  <button routerLink="txns">Transactions</button>
</div>
<div>
  <router-outlet></router-outlet>
</div>

When I navigate to localhost:4200 it sucessfully redirects to dashboard as expected and displaying dispatches component inside it.

But when I click on either dispatches or txns. These child components are not rendering inside dashboards router-outlet. and taking to this page below

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Do the following changes:

import { Routes } from '@angular/router';

const dashBoardRoutes : Routes = [
  {
    path: '',
    component: DashboardComponent,
    children: [
      {
        path: 'dispatches',
        component: DispatchesComponent
      },
      {
        path: 'txns',
        component: TransactionsComponent
      },
      {
        path: '',
        component: DispatchesComponent
      },
    ]
  },
]

With the old configuration, to render DashboardComponent, you would need to navigate to:

root/dashboard/dashboard

This is because you are prefixing all the lazy loaded routes with dashboard already in the main routing config.