Angular2 - router-outlet with login structure

Question

I'm building angular2 app and currently I have an home component with navbar, toolbar and router-outlet for the main content. I want to add one extra page for the login mechanism, so if the user is not authenticated the login page will be displayed in the entire screen and after login to user will be navigated to the component with the structure above.

How can I manage this structure? Do I need two router outlets? the first one for the navigation between login and home pages and one for the main content in the home page? Any other common structure which is more simple than two router outlets?

Answer 1

First of all, I highly recommend utilizing the updated Angular2 router. The newest router includes support for guards which are added to your route configuration to prevent access to certain routes.

After ensuring you have the latest router, you'll need to do several things:

1) Create a top-level component and call this App. This is where your <router-outlet> will go.

2) Create a Login component. This component should include a form for logging in to your application, along with the logic for handling login. Create a route for this component.

3) Create a Home component (you have already done this).

4) Use a guard (new functionality in the latest router) to prevent users from accessing the home component before logging in.

Your code will look something like this (for more info, see: https://medium.com/@blacksonic86/upgrading-to-the-new-angular-2-router-255605d9da26#.n7n1lc5cl)

// auth-guard.ts
import { Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import {
  CanActivate,
  Router,
  ActivatedRouteSnapshot,
  RouterStateSnapshot
} from '@angular/router';

import { AuthService } from './services/auth/auth.service';

@Injectable()
export class AuthGuard implements CanActivate {
  constructor(private authService: AuthService, private router: Router) {}

  canActivate(next: ActivatedRouteSnapshot, state: RouterStateSnapshot) {
    if (this.authService.isLoggedIn()) {
      return true;
    }

    this.router.navigate(['login']);
    return false;
  }
}

For more information on guards:

I would also highly suggest reading up on the latest Angular router (the docs have recently been updated): https://angular.io/docs/ts/latest/guide/router.html

Answer 2

I succeed achieving this workflow by implementing this structure. I have two main components:

LoginComponent which it's route is '/login'. HomeComponent which it's route is ''. (empty route).

In addition I set a guard for my HomeComponent which checks if the user is authenticated in his canActivate. If no I navigates the user to the '/login' route.

Then in my home component I have template with the following structure: tool-bar, side-menu, and router-outlet.

The last thing I have to do is to configure other app routes as children routes of my HomeComponent. (for example: '/news' is a child route of '').