Openui5: Router without usage of #

[tstorch]

OpenUI5 version:
all?

Proposal

Supply option to make the router work without the usage of '#' (URL fragment)

Currently, when navigating to a route the URL in the URL bar changes to <base_url>#/<route>. Also by simply entering the URL <base_url>#/<route> and hitting enter the corresponding navigation is internally triggered. It would be nice to have the option to simply use in both cases <base_url>/<route> or any other mechanism, that does not use #, i.e. the URL fragment.

Use case

I want to have an application with OAuth login (implicit grant flow) with a dedicated route/view/controller to handle the callback. The authorization server asks for the callback URL to be configured and forbids the usage of the symbol # in the callback URL, which makes sense as the implicit flow will pass the data back within the fragement of the URL, which would be appended after the # of my URL violating the URL anatomy.

[boghyon]

+1. AFAIK search engines also recommend to avoid relying on #. I guess this is also the reason why Demo Kit has recently moved away from it in order to improve SEO for its content (https://github.com/SAP/openui5/commit/4614eb0caa35fca6258b3bb50b48da5179381679).

[Mabenan]

Problem I see here is with the parameters set in url. Maybe you have noticed that the url is build up like this.

<protocol>://<host>:<port>/<base_url>?<parameters>#/<route>

[tstorch]

@Mabenan I don't exactly get what you want to say here. What exactly ist the problem with the paramaters?

[Mabenan]

<protocol>://<host>:<port>/<base_url>#/<route>?<parameters>

From my experience if you call the app like this the parameters are ignored

If we restructure it to the following

<protocol>://<host>:<port>/<base_url>/<route>?<parameters>

It gets complicated to detect the parameter start

I think this following will still lead to problems with other apis
<protocol>://<host>:<port>/<base_url>?<parameters>/<route>

[flovogt]

Hi @Mabenan and @tstorch ,
thanks a lot for the described scenarios. To offer a router implementation without the hash is definitely a new feature. We will discuss this enhancement in our team.

In other frameworks, e.g. Vue.js its possible to define a mode either hash or history. The history mode enables the router to work without the hash.

[codeworrior]

I agree with @flovogt that this is a (valid) enhancement request.

But I would also like to point out, that using the URL path to represent routes not only requires client side changes. It usually requires a server side counter part that maps all the different URL paths to one (or a few) entry page(s) and injects a corresponding into the returned page. Otherwise, only navigation within a session would work (via the history API), but bookmarks or deep links would result in 404s.

For UI5, this makes it a bit harder to provide this as a general feature, due to the variety of supported server side platforms. But a client side implementation with a limit set of supported backend platforms could at least be a starting point.

[flovogt]

Hi @tstorch ,
we've discussed this enhancement request and we're looking forward to implement this new feature.
The internal BLI is CPOUI5FRAMEWORK-152. Stay tuned for any updates!
Thanks for bringing up this topic.
Best Regards,
Florian