Directly modifying the URL path & search without any side effects.

[CMCDragonkai]

Is it possible to directly modify the URL's path and search without any sideeffects in terms of reloading, refreshing, reinitialising, or affecting AngularJS in anyway. Basically a pure cosmetic effect.

I need this sometimes when I need to correct the URL without doing anything else.

This could be useful for overlays that need a directly accessible URL. Or when someone enters the wrong title for a particular ID. See Stackoverflow, when you change the title but enter just the ID, it will correct the title portion of the URL to be correct.

I know history.pushState can do this, but when I try this inside AngularJS it results in 10 digest errors.

[jankuca]

Can you make a demo? I tried to call both history.pushState() and history.replaceState() with angular loaded and nothing happened. You are probably using routing right?

[CMCDragonkai]

Yes I was using ui-router state machine to do routing. Well regardless of whether it gives digest errors or nothing happening, manipulating the URL doesn't seem possible...?

[jankuca]

Are you saying that history.replaceState('', '', '/new-path') does not change the location for you?

[CMCDragonkai]

Well when I tried it gave me digest errors. Are saying it works for you?

[petebacondarwin]

If you replace the location outside of AngularJS it gets its knickers in a twist. $location relies on its own previous knowledge of what the location is in order to decide whether to update or not. If you change location outside of Angular, then $location gets stuck in a constant toing and froing causing a digest overflow. This should probably be fixed but I don't know how.

[CMCDragonkai]

Would it be possible to simply patch the location service to force a cosmetic change if possible?

[petebacondarwin]

I am going to look into this as it is going to be a problem for my github chrome extension.

[btford]

From what I understand, you can already accomplish this with either:

• reloadOnSearch: false
• $location.hash()

I have a modal services I implemented a wile ago that watches $location.hash(). It might be nice to compare notes. :)

I'm moving this to 1.2.1, but I think this can be closed.

[CMCDragonkai]

I know about those methods, but they only affect the hash or query parameters, not the path. Try using it with html5 urls. It doesn't work.From: Brian Ford Sent: Thu, Oct 3, 2013 07:38To: angular/angular.js angular.js@noreply.github.comCC: Roger Qiu roger.qiu@polycademy.comSubject: Re: [angular.js] Directly modifying the URL path & search without any side effects. (#3789)From what I understand, you can already accomplish this with either:

reloadOnSearch: false
$location.hash()
I have a modal services I implemented a wile ago that watches $location.hash(). It might be nice to compare notes. :)

I'm moving this to 1.2.1, but I think this can be closed.

—Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[josebalius]

@CMCDragonkai Did you ever find a solution for this? I need to change to do a history.replaceState outside of angular and digest is going crazy because of what @petebacondarwin said.

[CMCDragonkai]

I hacked up this solution using ui-router, but only with 0.4.0 not the latest version. To elegantly solve this problem, I think you will need to create the equivalent of ui-router and abstract the entire routing mechanism from AngularJS so that you can strictly control how routes map to the state changes. Sadly no easy solution as of yet. Check the issues of ui-router.

[gkoberger]

I am also having this problem. I'm trying to update the URL as a user scrolls, and it seems Angular has no desire to let this happen.

The closest hack I've managed is using $browser.url(...), however this reverts as soon as $apply() is called.

It would be great if there was a way to update $location's internals manually, perhaps?