AngularJS and PhoneGap: $location.path causes subsequent tempateUrl lookup to fail

Question

I'm having trouble getting path lookup to work with a AngularJS v1.2.0 and PhoneGap/Cordova Android application. I've come pretty far with html5mode(true) by setting <base href="."/> in index.html and then changing $routeProvider.when('/') to $routeProvider.when('/android_asset/www/index.html'). After that I am able to get redirectTo('login') to reach $routeProvider.when('/login') and there render templateUrl: 'static/partials/login.html' as expected.

The problem I have is that if I instead try to redirect to the login page from my Javascript code with $location.path('/login');, the route is found but templateUrl loading fails with an insecurl exception.

I've tried whitelisting access to file:// by using the new angular-sanitize module, but that does not help.

How can I make $location.path() do the same things as redirectTo so that the partial is loaded? Or is there some other way to solve this problem?

UPDATE: I got a bit forward by adding a call to replace() after the path function, e.g.:

$location.path('/login').replace();

but that seems like a hack, and it still causes the templateUrl in the otherwise route to fail with the same exception.

Any ideas on what might be wrong? Is it that html5mode(true) just does not work at this moment with Phonegap and the only way to fix this is to set it to false and add hashtags to every path (like is done in the angular phonegap seed project)?

Answer 1

For future reference, this is how I managed to solve the problem:

1. AngularJS currently does not seem to support html5mode(true) inside a Cordova application because of the insecurl problem I reported. What I had to do is add

   var h5m = (typeof html5Mode !== 'undefined') ? html5Mode : true;
   $locationProvider.html5Mode(h5m);
   

   which gives me the possibility to explicitly set html5Mode in the PhoneGap index.html with a global variable:

   <script>
     var html5Mode = false;
   </script>
   

2. So now $location.path('/login') as well as redirectTo: 'login' works, but links in html files, don't. To get those working in PhoneGap, with html5Mode disabled, I had to add #/ in front of every link, e.g. <a href="#/login">login</a>.

3. That makes PhoneGap work, but breaks the web page which uses History API with html5Mode(true). The last piece of the puzzle was to add <base href="/"/> to the web page's index.html (and leave it out of the index.html of the PhoneGap project.) So now even though I have a link that says #/login in the web page, I get to the url http://example.com/login and don't see any hashes in the address bar.

**

So in the end I have History API working in my web page and History API disabled in the PhoneGap project (where there really is no need for History API as there is no address bar). The only downside is the extra #/ I have to put in each template html file, but that is a minor annoyance compared to the ability to use all of the same html and javascript files for both web and mobile.