Question

I have a view that contains an anchor link. That link has an href to another url in my site. Angular tries to load that site, using html5mode. I would rather just have default behavior for that link and send the user off to the url. How can I specify that this particular link should behave like a normal html link, not an angular route?

Answer 1

AngularJS understands a few rules that will make the browser perform a full reload. The rules are documented under the ‘Html link rewriting’ section in the $location service documentation.

From the documentation:

In cases like the following, links are not rewritten; instead, the browser will perform a full page reload to the original link.

• Links that contain target element
  Example: <a href="/ext/link?a=b" target="_self">link</a>
• Absolute links that go to a different domain
  Example: <a href="http://angularjs.org/">link</a>
• Links starting with ‘/’ that lead to a different base path when base is defined
  Example: <a href="/not-my-base/link">link</a>

Note that the last example only works if you have used the base element in the head section of your page:

<base href="/my-base/" />