close

Routing and Navigation in Vue.js - A Comprehensive Guide

Routing and Navigation are essential concepts in Vue.js for creating pages and navigating between them in a web application. Vue Router is a powerful and flexible library for managing the routing system in Vue.js.

 

Here are the fundamental concepts related to routes in Vue.js:

  1. Route: A route defines a path and links it to a corresponding component. Each route has a path and a component.

  2. Vue Router: Vue Router is a library for managing routes in Vue.js. It provides tools to define and manage routes in a Vue application.

  3. Route Component: Each route has a corresponding component. When a route is activated, the associated component will be displayed.

  4. Dynamic Route: A dynamic route allows you to define routes with dynamic parameters. For example, you can define a route with the path "/user/:id" to display user information with the corresponding id.

  5. Nested Route: A nested route is a concept that allows you to nest child routes within a parent route. This enables you to build complex route structures and organize components in a nested manner.

  6. Redirect Route: A redirect route allows you to redirect users from one path to another. This is useful when you want to route users from an old path to a new one.

  7. Route Guard: A route guard is a function that allows you to check and control access to routes. By using route guards, you can define conditions to prevent users from accessing certain routes or perform special handling before redirection.

 

To use Vue Router, you can follow these steps:

Step 1: Install Vue Router using npm or yarn:

npm install vue-router

or

yarn add vue-router

Step 2: Create a router.js file in the project's root directory. In this file, we will declare and configure the routes of the application.

import Vue from 'vue';
import VueRouter from 'vue-router';

Vue.use(VueRouter);

const router = new VueRouter({
  routes: [
    // Declare routes here
  ]
});

export default router;

Step 3: In the main.js file, import Vue Router and link it to the Vue application:

import Vue from 'vue';
import App from './App.vue';
import router from './router';

new Vue({
  router,
  render: h => h(App),
}).$mount('#app');

Step 4: In the router.js file, you can declare routes using Vue Router components such as path, component, and other properties.

For example, you can declare a route for the home page and a route for the about page as follows:

import Home from './components/Home.vue';
import About from './components/About.vue';

const router = new VueRouter({
  routes: [
    { path: '/', component: Home },
    { path: '/about', component: About }
  ]
});

Step 5: In Vue components, you can use components like <router-link> to create links to other routes, and <router-view> to display the content of the current route.

For example, in the template of the Home component, you can use <router-link> to create a link to the about page:

<router-link to="/about">Go to About</router-link>

In the template of the App component, you can use <router-view> to display the content of the current route:

<router-view></router-view>

With these steps, you have set up and used Vue Router to manage routing and navigation in your Vue.js application.