Ember.JS: How to handle invalid URLs

There’s a lot of documentation for the new Ember Router. However, I found that no one was talking about how to handle the “*” route in Ember, i.e. the routes that don’t match anything.

I first tried to look at the ApplicationRoute but that didn’t seem to throw anything. Ember just sits there with a lovely blank page!

ApplicationRoute { 
  events: { 
    errors: function(reason, transition) {
        console.log("never happened");
    } 
  } 
}

So here’s the easiest solution for handling bad urls. My router looks like this now:

App.Router.map( function() {

 this.route('login');
 this.resource('companies', {path: 'companies'});
 this.resource('company', {path: 'companies/:company_nice_url'}, function() {
   this.route('members');
   …
 });

 …

 this.route('bad_url', { path: '/*badurl' }); // Catch everything else!

});

The last route named “bad_url” will catch all the other unrecognized URLs and direct the user to the App.BadUrlRoute where you can handle them. You will get the URL segment as params.bad_url for you to inspect and offer friendly advice like “hey did you mistype companies?”.

If you simply want to show a page that says “There’s no one here you fool!”, just create a handlebars template:

<script type="text/x-handlebars" data-template-name="bad-url">
  <h1>There’s no one here you fool!!!!</h1>
</script>

And you’re done! Any path that doesn’t match your routes will get routed through ‘bad-url’, where you can act on it accordingly.

EDIT ON 6TH AUGUST

Marcus in the comments pointed out to me that using path: '/*badurl'  is better due to this handling "/this/is/wrong/path" situations. My initial solution to using a dynamic segment (:bad_url) did not catch this. Thanks to all the commenters!

EDIT ON 7TH AUGUST

I have realised that having "*badurl" instead of ":bad_url" has one caveat. I am implementing a funky search route that deals with all URLs past a base route like this: /search/x/y/z/a/b/c . Having the astriks to catch all the bad url's makes it impossible to have a search router which deals with "/search/*search_terms". So there you go... ups and downs to both methods. More on that awesome search route another day... :)