Angular Guards: Explained with Examples

Angular, a platform and framework for building single-page client applications using HTML and TypeScript, has evolved significantly over the years, enhancing its capabilities with each version. Angular, the latest iteration at the time of writing, continues this tradition, offering developers more refined tools and features to create dynamic and robust applications. One of the critical features in Angular that help secure routes and manage access control effectively is Guards. In this article, we delve into Angular Guards, showcasing their utility with relevant coding examples to guide you through implementing route protection in your Angular applications.

Understanding Angular Guards

Angular Guards are a set of interfaces that can be implemented to perform route navigation handling. Essentially, they allow you to check permissions or other conditions before the router activates a route, cancels navigation, or redirects to another route. This capability is crucial for any application that requires login functionality, access control, or route management based on specific conditions.

The Angular framework provides several guard types, each serving a distinct purpose:

• CanActivate: Determines if a route can be activated.
• CanActivateChild: Determines if children's routes of a route can be activated.
• CanDeactivate: Determines if you can navigate away from the current route.