Handling trailing slashes in angularUI router

Question

It's been hours since I started working on this problem and I can't seem to get my head around the solution.

I have an app that may result in users actually typing in the URL. In such cases it is not hard to believe that user might enter a trailing slash. For example,

www.example.com/users/2 and www.example.com/edit/company/123

should be treated the same as

www.example.com/users/2/ and www.example.com/edit/company/123/

This only needs to done for handling URL routing on the client side. I am not interested in handling trailing slashes in resource/API calls. I am only interested in handling trailing slashed in the browser.

So I researched and found not many answers on the net. Most of them led me to the FAQ section of angular-ui router.

https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Questions

Here they tell us to write a rule, which is what I want to do, but it doesn't seem to be working, or maybe I am doing it wrong.

Here's the plunkr where I have added my code.

http://plnkr.co/edit/fD9q7L?p=preview

I have added this to my config, the rest of the code is pretty much the basic stuff.

$urlRouterProvider.rule(function($injector, $location) {
  //if last charcter is a slash, return the same url without the slash
  if($location.$$url[length-1] === '/') {
    return $location.$$url.substr(0,$location.$$url.length - 2);
  } else {
    //if the last char is not a trailing slash, do nothing
    return $location.$$url;
  }
});

Basically, I want to make the trailing slash optional, ie it's presence or absence on the address bar should have no effect on the state loaded.

Answer 1

There is a link to working plunker

And this is the updated rule definition:

  $urlRouterProvider.rule(function($injector, $location) {

    var path = $location.path();
    var hasTrailingSlash = path[path.length-1] === '/';

    if(hasTrailingSlash) {

      //if last charcter is a slash, return the same url without the slash  
      var newPath = path.substr(0, path.length - 1); 
      return newPath; 
    } 

  });

And these links will now work properly:

  <ul class="nav">
    <li><a ui-sref="route1">Route 1</a></li>
    <li><a ui-sref="route2">Route 2</a></li>
    <li><a href="#/route1/">#/route1/</a></li>
    <li><a href="#/route2/">#/route2/</a></li>
    <li><a href="#/route1" >#/route1</a></li>
    <li><a href="#/route2" >#/route2</a></li>
  </ul>

The magic could be defined like this: do return changed value if there is a change... otherwise do nothing... see example