Show loading screen when navigating between routes in Angular 2

Question

The current Angular Router provides Navigation Events. You can subscribe to these and make UI changes accordingly. Remember to count in other Events such as NavigationCancel and NavigationError to stop your spinner in case router transitions fail.

app.component.ts - your root component

...
import {
  Router,
  // import as RouterEvent to avoid confusion with the DOM Event
  Event as RouterEvent,
  NavigationStart,
  NavigationEnd,
  NavigationCancel,
  NavigationError
} from '@angular/router'

@Component({})
export class AppComponent {

  // Sets initial value to true to show loading spinner on first load
  loading = true

  constructor(private router: Router) {
    this.router.events.subscribe((e : RouterEvent) => {
       this.navigationInterceptor(e);
     })
  }

  // Shows and hides the loading spinner during RouterEvent changes
  navigationInterceptor(event: RouterEvent): void {
    if (event instanceof NavigationStart) {
      this.loading = true
    }
    if (event instanceof NavigationEnd) {
      this.loading = false
    }

    // Set loading state to false in both of the below events to hide the spinner in case a request fails
    if (event instanceof NavigationCancel) {
      this.loading = false
    }
    if (event instanceof NavigationError) {
      this.loading = false
    }
  }
}

app.component.html - your root view

<div class="loading-overlay" *ngIf="loading">
    <!-- show something fancy here, here with Angular 2 Material's loading bar or circle -->
    <md-progress-bar mode="indeterminate"></md-progress-bar>
</div>

Performance Improved Answer: If you care about performance there is a better method, it is slightly more tedious to implement but the performance improvement will be worth the extra work. Instead of using *ngIf to conditionally show the spinner, we could leverage Angular's NgZone and Renderer to switch on / off the spinner which will bypass Angular's change detection when we change the spinner's state. I found this to make the animation smoother compared to using *ngIf or an async pipe.

This is similar to my previous answer with some tweaks:

app.component.ts - your root component

...
import {
  Router,
  // import as RouterEvent to avoid confusion with the DOM Event
  Event as RouterEvent,
  NavigationStart,
  NavigationEnd,
  NavigationCancel,
  NavigationError
} from '@angular/router'
import {NgZone, Renderer, ElementRef, ViewChild} from '@angular/core'


@Component({})
export class AppComponent {

  // Instead of holding a boolean value for whether the spinner
  // should show or not, we store a reference to the spinner element,
  // see template snippet below this script
  @ViewChild('spinnerElement')
  spinnerElement: ElementRef

  constructor(private router: Router,
              private ngZone: NgZone,
              private renderer: Renderer) {
    router.events.subscribe(this._navigationInterceptor)
  }

  // Shows and hides the loading spinner during RouterEvent changes
  private _navigationInterceptor(event: RouterEvent): void {
    if (event instanceof NavigationStart) {
      // We wanna run this function outside of Angular's zone to
      // bypass change detection
      this.ngZone.runOutsideAngular(() => {
        // For simplicity we are going to turn opacity on / off
        // you could add/remove a class for more advanced styling
        // and enter/leave animation of the spinner
        this.renderer.setElementStyle(
          this.spinnerElement.nativeElement,
          'opacity',
          '1'
        )
      })
    }
    if (event instanceof NavigationEnd) {
      this._hideSpinner()
    }
    // Set loading state to false in both of the below events to
    // hide the spinner in case a request fails
    if (event instanceof NavigationCancel) {
      this._hideSpinner()
    }
    if (event instanceof NavigationError) {
      this._hideSpinner()
    }
  }

  private _hideSpinner(): void {
    // We wanna run this function outside of Angular's zone to
    // bypass change detection,
    this.ngZone.runOutsideAngular(() => {
      // For simplicity we are going to turn opacity on / off
      // you could add/remove a class for more advanced styling
      // and enter/leave animation of the spinner
      this.renderer.setElementStyle(
        this.spinnerElement.nativeElement,
        'opacity',
        '0'
      )
    })
  }
}

app.component.html - your root view

<div class="loading-overlay" #spinnerElement style="opacity: 0;">
    <!-- md-spinner is short for <md-progress-circle mode="indeterminate"></md-progress-circle> -->
    <md-spinner></md-spinner>
</div>

UPDATE:3 Now that I have upgraded to new Router, @borislemke's approach will not work if you use CanDeactivate guard. I'm degrading to my old method, ie: this answer

UPDATE2: Router events in new-router look promising and the answer by @borislemke seems to cover the main aspect of spinner implementation, I havent't tested it but I recommend it.

UPDATE1: I wrote this answer in the era of Old-Router, when there used to be only one event route-changed notified via router.subscribe(). I also felt overload of the below approach and tried to do it using only router.subscribe(), and it backfired because there was no way to detect canceled navigation. So I had to revert back to lengthy approach(double work).

---

If you know your way around in Angular2, this is what you'll need

---

Boot.ts

import {bootstrap} from '@angular/platform-browser-dynamic';
import {MyApp} from 'path/to/MyApp-Component';
import { SpinnerService} from 'path/to/spinner-service';

bootstrap(MyApp, [SpinnerService]);

Root Component- (MyApp)

import { Component } from '@angular/core';
import { SpinnerComponent} from 'path/to/spinner-component';
@Component({
  selector: 'my-app',
  directives: [SpinnerComponent],
  template: `
     <spinner-component></spinner-component>
     <router-outlet></router-outlet>
   `
})
export class MyApp { }

Spinner-Component (will subscribe to Spinner-service to change the value of active accordingly)

import {Component} from '@angular/core';
import { SpinnerService} from 'path/to/spinner-service';
@Component({
  selector: 'spinner-component',
  'template': '<div *ngIf="active" class="spinner loading"></div>'
})
export class SpinnerComponent {
  public active: boolean;

  public constructor(spinner: SpinnerService) {
    spinner.status.subscribe((status: boolean) => {
      this.active = status;
    });
  }
}

Spinner-Service (bootstrap this service)

Define an observable to be subscribed by spinner-component to change the status on change, and function to know and set the spinner active/inactive.

import {Injectable} from '@angular/core';
import {Subject} from 'rxjs/Subject';
import 'rxjs/add/operator/share';

@Injectable()
export class SpinnerService {
  public status: Subject<boolean> = new Subject();
  private _active: boolean = false;

  public get active(): boolean {
    return this._active;
  }

  public set active(v: boolean) {
    this._active = v;
    this.status.next(v);
  }

  public start(): void {
    this.active = true;
  }

  public stop(): void {
    this.active = false;
  }
}

All Other Routes' Components

(sample):

import { Component} from '@angular/core';
import { SpinnerService} from 'path/to/spinner-service';
@Component({
   template: `<div *ngIf="!spinner.active" id="container">Nothing is Loading Now</div>`
})
export class SampleComponent {

  constructor(public spinner: SpinnerService){} 

  ngOnInit(){
    this.spinner.stop(); // or do it on some other event eg: when xmlhttp request completes loading data for the component
  }

  ngOnDestroy(){
    this.spinner.start();
  }
}

Why not just using simple css :

<router-outlet></router-outlet>
<div class="loading"></div>

And in your styles :

div.loading{
    height: 100px;
    background-color: red;
    display: none;
}
router-outlet + div.loading{
    display: block;
}

Or even we can do this for the first answer:

<router-outlet></router-outlet>
<spinner-component></spinner-component>

And then simply just

spinner-component{
   display:none;
}
router-outlet + spinner-component{
    display: block;
}

The trick here is, the new routes and components will always appear after router-outlet , so with a simple css selector we can show and hide the loading.

If you have special logic required for the first route only you can do the following:

AppComponent

    loaded = false;

    constructor(private router: Router....) {
       router.events.pipe(filter(e => e instanceof NavigationEnd), take(1))
                    .subscribe((e) => {
                       this.loaded = true;
                       alert('loaded - this fires only once');
                   });

I had a need for this to hide my page footer, which was otherwise appearing at the top of the page. Also if you only want a loader for the first page you can use this.

You could also use this existing solution. The demo is here. It looks like youtube loading bar. I just found it and added it to my own project.