6.3 Using Router Links for Navigation

Hi folks, in this lesson, we're going to look at router links, which are anchor tags in our template that users will click on to navigate around our application. They're very commonly used, so it's vital to have a good understanding of how to use them. We know at this point that we can enter different URLs into the address bar in order to render different components into the view. But we cannot expect our users to know which URLs they will need to enter into the address bar in order to navigate to the different parts of the application. They should be able to navigate using the UI of the application rather than the browser's address bar. And this is the primary purpose of router links. Let's see how they can be used. We going to add a new component to the application, called help, which will contain some instructions for the game. We can use the CLI to generate this component. And let's import this new component now into our routes file. And now we can add a new route for the component. So this should go above the empty and wild card routes That's actually all we need to do. Once routing is set up, it's incredibly easy to add new routes. I've already got the content and styling for this component ready in a text file on my desktop. So I'm not gonna make you sit there and watch me type out a bunch of paragraphs of text or anything, don't worry. All right, so lets just go back to the browser and test out the route and make sure that everything is working. And we can see that it is. So now let's add a router link to the header in the home component which can be used to navigate to the help page. A router link is just a regular link that uses a router link directive. This directive comes to us from the routing module, so we don't have to import anything extra to use it. We can just add it to the template and it should work as expected immediately. So we can see that this help link has been added. Let's just go back to the home page and if we click on the Help link then we get taken to the help route. So the value that we give to this directive, Is the route that we would like to navigate to when the anchor is clicked. So let's just tidy things up with a little styling for the link in the home component. There's not much so I'm just gonna add that now. And I've added that to the wrong place, so I'm just gonna copy all of that and that should actually go into the home component, not the help component. And that just tidies the link up slightly. So another routing feature that we can make use of is the router link active directive, which allows us to specify a class name that should be added to the anchor whenever the route that the anchor links to is active. So the directive is called routerLinkActive, and we just provide that with the class name that we would like applied when the route is active. And in this case, the class name is also active. So let's just go back to the browser now. And we can see already that we are on the help route, so the help component is active and we get the active styling with a little line above the Help anchor here. And let's just go back to the start page, and we can see that the help link no longer has the active styling. This is another very useful, very commonly used feature of routing. So in this lesson, we've learned how we can use regular anchor tags to hook into our applications routing to allow users to navigate around our application. We saw that we used the routerLink directive to tell Angular which route the link should never go to. And that we can use the routerLinkActive directive to add a class name with active to any link whose route is currently loaded in a router outlet. Thanks for watching