Angular 4 comes with some useful changes in the router. Let’s take a look at the changes in receiving parameters by a route and in the CanDeactivate guard (see here).

A route can receive the parameters either using a snapshot property of the ActivatedRoute or by subscribing to its property param. Now there is a property paramMap that allows you to either get a particular parameter by using the method get() or get all parameters by invoking getAll().

Here’s how to receive a parameter id that’s not changing in the parent:

export class ProductDetailComponentParam {
  productID: string;

  constructor(route: ActivatedRoute) {
    this.productID = route.snapshot.paramMap.get('id');
  }
}

If the parameter id is changing in the parent (as described here), you can subscribe to the stream of id’s as follows:

export class ProductDetailComponentParam {
  productID: string;

  constructor(route: ActivatedRoute) {

    route.paramMap.subscribe(
     params => this.productID = params.get('id')
     );
  }
}

The CanDeactivate guard now allows you to be more specific and conditionally prohibit navigating from a route depending on where the user is planning to navigate. The interface CanDeactivate now has an optional parameter nextState, which you can check to decide if you want to prohibit the navigation or not. The next code snippet shows the guard that would display a warning popup only if the user is trying to navigate to the home route represented by the path ‘/’. The navigation to any other routes remains unguarded.

@Injectable()
export class UnsavedChangesGuard implements CanDeactivate<ProductDetailComponent>{

    constructor(private _router:Router){}

    canDeactivate(component: ProductDetailComponent, 
                  currentRoute: ActivatedRouteSnapshot,
                  currentState: RouterStateSnapshot, 
                  nextState?: RouterStateSnapshot){

        let canLeave: boolean = true;

        // If the user wants to go to home component
        if (nextState.url === '/') {
          canLeave = window.confirm("You have unsaved changes. Still want to go home?");
        }
        return canLeave;

    }
}

Angular 4 was just released and there might be some other goodies in the router, but I just wanted to share with you these convenient additions.