angularjs - stop angular-ui-router navigation until promise is resolved

Question

I want to prevent some flickering that happens when rails devise timeout occurs, but angular doesn't know until the next authorization error from a resource.

What happens is that the template is rendered, some ajax calls for resources happen and then we are redirected to rails devise to login. I would rather do a ping to rails on every state change and if rails session has expired then I will immediately redirect BEFORE the template is rendered.

ui-router has resolve that can be put on every route but that doesn't seem DRY at all.

What I have is this. But the promise is not resolved until the state is already transitioned.

$rootScope.$on('$stateChangeStart', function(event, toState, toParams, fromState, fromParams){
        //check that user is logged in
        $http.get('/api/ping').success(function(data){
          if (data.signed_in) {
            $scope.signedIn = true;
          } else {
            window.location.href = '/rails/devise/login_path'
          }
        })

    });

How can I interrupt the state transition, before the new template is rendered, based on the result of a promise?

Answer 1

I know this is extremely late to the game, but I wanted to throw my opinion out there and discuss what I believe is an excellent way to "pause" a state change. Per the documentation of angular-ui-router, any member of the "resolve" object of the state that is a promise must be resolved before the state is finished loading. So my functional (albeit not yet cleaned and perfected) solution, is to add a promise to the resolve object of the "toState" on "$stateChangeStart":

for example:

$rootScope.$on('$stateChangeStart', function (event, toState, toParams) {
    toState.resolve.promise = [
        '$q',
        function($q) {
            var defer = $q.defer();
            $http.makeSomeAPICallOrWhatever().then(function (resp) {
                if(resp = thisOrThat) {
                    doSomeThingsHere();
                    defer.resolve();
                } else {
                    doOtherThingsHere();
                    defer.resolve();
                }
            });
            return defer.promise;
        }
    ]
});

This will ensure that the state-change holds for the promise to be resolved which is done when the API call finishes and all the decisions based on the return from the API are made. I've used this to check login statuses on the server-side before allowing a new page to be navigated to. When the API call resolves I either use "event.preventDefault()" to stop the original navigation and then route to the login page (surrounding the whole block of code with an if state.name != "login") or allow the user to continue by simply resolving the deferred promise instead of trying to using bypass booleans and preventDefault().

Although I'm sure the original poster has long since figured out their issue, I really hope this helps someone else out there.

EDIT

I figured I didn't want to mislead people. Here's what the code should look like if you are not sure if your states have resolve objects:

$rootScope.$on('$stateChangeStart', function (event, toState, toParams) {
    if (!toState.resolve) { toState.resolve = {} };
    toState.resolve.pauseStateChange = [
        '$q',
        function($q) {
            var defer = $q.defer();
            $http.makeSomeAPICallOrWhatever().then(function (resp) {
                if(resp = thisOrThat) {
                    doSomeThingsHere();
                    defer.resolve();
                } else {
                    doOtherThingsHere();
                    defer.resolve();
                }
            });
            return defer.promise;
        }
    ]
});

EDIT 2

in order to get this working for states that don't have a resolve definition you need to add this in the app.config:

   var $delegate = $stateProvider.state;
        $stateProvider.state = function(name, definition) {
            if (!definition.resolve) {
                definition.resolve = {};
            }

            return $delegate.apply(this, arguments);
        };

doing if (!toState.resolve) { toState.resolve = {} }; in stateChangeStart doesn't seem to work, i think ui-router doesn't accept a resolve dict after it has been initialised.