Angular UI router in angular 1.5

Routers in angular

As mentioned earlier, the two mainstream routers for angular.js is ngRoute an ui-router. There is the new router which is part of angular 2.0 - Although it promises amazing features, I currently do not recommend adoption of it and angular 2.0 until it's stable and because of stories like this and issues like this.

Read before upgrading

"Upgrading" to the newest stable release of any library is most alwasy preferable. But before you do; you should read the release notes for every single version up to the version that you're upgrading.

Check the migration guide

Google is working on improving their angular documentation. The migration documentation however is particularly good. Take a look at it here

Depending on the status of your project you might want to stick with the ui-router as angular 1.5 is backwards compatible with all your modules and the upgrade should be smooth (read the docs though, including the upgrade to 1.4).

On the other hand, Angular 1.5 is meant to bring us close to the concepts and architecture of Angular 2 and web components (which are now thought of as the future of web development) so it's a step on the learning curve that most ng1.x developers should take.

Angular 1.5 allows you to write your app in a component based fashion with a different routing mechanism, having routes/URLs load components that you defined instead of loading partials.

Routes can now be embedded in child components (say you have a Users module which has a /list, /details/:id/:slug, /edit/:id routes/sub-components and this Users module can be attached to whatever URL from your app: /users, /admin/users/ while keeping its internal routing mechanism. Your base app will have non-terminal routes for this kind of components (specified with /... meaning it will leave the consequent routing to the component itself).

Also, you can have multiple active routes at once (i.e. think modals, as in Gmail where you can look at a message and have the Compose popup and then navigate to the message list while still having the Compose popup open).

Routing events are now hooks that you can implement in your own component so you can do your resolves locally (fetch data, check for user rights, etc), taking care of destroying stuff, specify whether the component should be reused or reinstantiated, etc.

Bottom Line

In Angular 1.5 the new routing mechanism is based on components instead of states/views so your app needs a refactor towards this concept in order to fully benefit from it.