The <A/> Component

Client-side navigation works perfectly fine with ordinary HTML <a> elements. The router adds a listener that handles every click on a <a> element and tries to handle it on the client side, i.e., without doing another round trip to the server to request HTML. This is what enables the snappy “single-page app” navigations you’re probably familiar with from most modern web apps.

The router will bail out of handling an <a> click under a number of situations

  • the click event has had prevent_default() called on it
  • the Meta, Alt, Ctrl, or Shift keys were held during click
  • the <a> has a target or download attribute, or rel="external"
  • the link has a different origin from the current location

In other words, the router will only try to do a client-side navigation when it’s pretty sure it can handle it, and it will upgrade every <a> element to get this special behavior.

This also means that if you need to opt out of client-side routing, you can do so easily. For example, if you have a link to another page on the same domain, but which isn’t part of your Leptos app, you can just use <a rel="external"> to tell the router it isn’t something it can handle.

The router also provides an <A> component, which does two additional things:

  1. Correctly resolves relative nested routes. Relative routing with ordinary <a> tags can be tricky. For example, if you have a route like /post/:id, <A href="1"> will generate the correct relative route, but <a href="1"> likely will not (depending on where it appears in your view.) <A/> resolves routes relative to the path of the nested route within which it appears.
  2. Sets the aria-current attribute to page if this link is the active link (i.e., it’s a link to the page you’re on). This is helpful for accessibility and for styling. For example, if you want to set the link a different color if it’s a link to the page you’re currently on, you can match this attribute with a CSS selector.

Your most-used methods of navigating between pages should be with <a> and <form> elements or with the enhanced <A/> and <Form/> components. Using links and forms to navigate is the best solution for accessibility and graceful degradation.

On occasion, though, you’ll want to navigate programmatically, i.e., call a function that can navigate to a new page. In that case, you should use the use_navigate function.

let navigate = leptos_router::use_navigate();
navigate("/somewhere", Default::default());

You should almost never do something like <button on:click=move |_| navigate(/* ... */)>. Any on:click that navigates should be an <a>, for reasons of accessibility.

The second argument here is a set of NavigateOptions, which includes options to resolve the navigation relative to the current route as the <A/> component does, replace it in the navigation stack, include some navigation state, and maintain the current scroll state on navigation.

Once again, this is the same example. Check out the relative <A/> components, and take a look at the CSS in index.html to see the ARIA-based styling.

Live example

Click to open CodeSandbox.

CodeSandbox Source 
use leptos::*;
use leptos_router::*;

#[component]
fn App() -> impl IntoView {
    view! {
        <Router>
            <h1>"Contact App"</h1>
            // this <nav> will show on every routes,
            // because it's outside the <Routes/>
            // note: we can just use normal <a> tags
            // and the router will use client-side navigation
            <nav>
                <h2>"Navigation"</h2>
                <a href="/">"Home"</a>
                <a href="/contacts">"Contacts"</a>
            </nav>
            <main>
                <Routes>
                    // / just has an un-nested "Home"
                    <Route path="/" view=|| view! {
                        <h3>"Home"</h3>
                    }/>
                    // /contacts has nested routes
                    <Route
                        path="/contacts"
                        view=ContactList
                      >
                        // if no id specified, fall back
                        <Route path=":id" view=ContactInfo>
                            <Route path="" view=|| view! {
                                <div class="tab">
                                    "(Contact Info)"
                                </div>
                            }/>
                            <Route path="conversations" view=|| view! {
                                <div class="tab">
                                    "(Conversations)"
                                </div>
                            }/>
                        </Route>
                        // if no id specified, fall back
                        <Route path="" view=|| view! {
                            <div class="select-user">
                                "Select a user to view contact info."
                            </div>
                        }/>
                    </Route>
                </Routes>
            </main>
        </Router>
    }
}

#[component]
fn ContactList() -> impl IntoView {
    view! {
        <div class="contact-list">
            // here's our contact list component itself
            <div class="contact-list-contacts">
                <h3>"Contacts"</h3>
                <A href="alice">"Alice"</A>
                <A href="bob">"Bob"</A>
                <A href="steve">"Steve"</A>
            </div>

            // <Outlet/> will show the nested child route
            // we can position this outlet wherever we want
            // within the layout
            <Outlet/>
        </div>
    }
}

#[component]
fn ContactInfo() -> impl IntoView {
    // we can access the :id param reactively with `use_params_map`
    let params = use_params_map();
    let id = move || params.with(|params| params.get("id").cloned().unwrap_or_default());

    // imagine we're loading data from an API here
    let name = move || match id().as_str() {
        "alice" => "Alice",
        "bob" => "Bob",
        "steve" => "Steve",
        _ => "User not found.",
    };

    view! {
        <div class="contact-info">
            <h4>{name}</h4>
            <div class="tabs">
                <A href="" exact=true>"Contact Info"</A>
                <A href="conversations">"Conversations"</A>
            </div>

            // <Outlet/> here is the tabs that are nested
            // underneath the /contacts/:id route
            <Outlet/>
        </div>
    }
}

fn main() {
    leptos::mount_to_body(App)
}