Redirect a state to default substate with UI-Router in AngularJS

Question

I'm creating a tab based page which shows some data. I'm using UI-Router in AngularJs to register states.

My aim is to have one default tab open on page load. Each tab have sub tabs, and I would like to have a default sub tab open when changing tabs.

I was testing with onEnter function and inside I'm using $state.go('mainstate.substate'); but it seems not to work due to loop effect issues (on state.go to substate it calls its parent state and so on, and it turns into a loop).

$stateProvider

.state('main', {
  url: '/main',
  templateUrl: 'main.html',
  onEnter: function($state) {
    $state.go('main.street');
  }
})

.state('main.street', {
  url: '/street',
  templateUrl: 'submenu.html',
  params: {tabName: 'street'}
})

Here I created a plunker demo.

For now everything works, except that I don't have the default tab open and that's exactly what I need.

Thank you for your suggestions, opinions and ideas.

Answer 1

Update: 1.0 Onwards Supports redirectTo out of the box.

https://ui-router.github.io/ng1/docs/latest/interfaces/state.statedeclaration.html#redirectto

---

I created an example here.

This solution comes from a nice "Comment" to an an issue with redirection using .when() (https://stackoverflow.com/a/27131114/1679310) and really cool solution for it (by Chris T, but the original post was by yahyaKacem)

https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router/issues/1584#issuecomment-75137373

So firstly let's extend main with redirection setting:

$stateProvider
    .state('main', {
      url: '/main',
      templateUrl: 'main.html',
      redirectTo: 'main.street',
    })

And add only this few lines into run

app.run(['$rootScope', '$state', function($rootScope, $state) {

    $rootScope.$on('$stateChangeStart', function(evt, to, params) {
      if (to.redirectTo) {
        evt.preventDefault();
        $state.go(to.redirectTo, params, {location: 'replace'})
      }
    });
}]);

This way we can adjust any of our states with its default redirection...Check it here

EDIT: Added option from comment by @Alec to preserve the browser history.