Angular ui router ui-sref-active on parent

Question

I have one parent state and many childs states. If I want the ui-sref-active on the parent to work when I am on one of the child I need to do this "hack":

$scope.isActive = function() {  
   return $state.includes('playLotteries.Index') 
       || $state.includes('playLotteries.Group')  
       || $state.includes('playLotteries.hunter');
   }

This is very ugly way and I have many children so its not seems like good solution. Anyone have another solution for this problem?

Answer 1

There is a UI-Router directive:

ui-sref-active="class-name-to-use"

which from a version 0.2.11 does exactly what we need:

uiSrefActive:

BREAKING CHANGE: Also activate for child states. (bf163ad, closes #818)
uiSrefActiveEq: new directive with old ui-sref-active behavior

so, if we want just assign class for exact match, we have to use this: ui-sref-active-eq="class-name-to-use"

So, why are you experiencing: this is not working?

Because it is working only in conjunction with ui-sref directive.

There is a working plunker

These won't work as expected:

// NOT working as expected
<a ui-sref-active="current" href="#/home">
<a ui-sref-active="current" href="#/home/child1">
<a ui-sref-active="current" href="#/home/child2">

But these will be working:

// conjunction ui-sref and ui-sref-active is working
<a ui-sref-active="current" ui-sref="home">
<a ui-sref-active="current" ui-sref="home.child1">
<a ui-sref-active="current" ui-sref="home.child2">

Check it in action here. Example uses this UI-Router 0.2.12 release - and this zip

EXTEND: Parent should be abstract, some of its children should always be selected

In that case, we can use another feature of the UI-Router, the: $urlRouterProvider.when().

There is extended plunker So, with state definition like this:

// when 'home' is selected ... 'home.child2' is used for redirection 
$urlRouterProvider.when('/home', '/home/child2');
// instead of 'other' - its 'other.child2' is used... could be any (e.g. other.child1)
$urlRouterProvider.when('/other', '/other/child2');

$urlRouterProvider.otherwise('/home/child2'); 

So, now, always child is selected (even if navigating to parent) and parent is getting its ui-sref-active. Check it here