Summary

Track unique history location states

Motivation

The path alone does not provide enough information. For example, if you visit page A, scroll down, then click on a link to page B, then click on a link back to page A. Your actual browser history stack is [A, B, A]. Each of those nodes in the history should have their own unique scroll position. In order to record this position we need a UUID for each node in the history.

This API will allow other libraries to reflect upon each location to determine unique state. For example, ember-router-scroll is making use of a modified Ember.HistoryLocation object to get this behavior.

Tracking unique state is required when setting the scroll position properly based upon where you are in the history stack, as described in Motivation

Detailed design

Code: PR#14011

We simply unique identifier (UUID) so we can track uniqueness on two dimensions. Both path and the generated uuid. A simple UUID generator such as https://gist.github.com/lukemelia/9daf074b1b2dfebc0bd87552d0f6a537 should suffice.

How We Teach This

We could describe what meta data is generated for each location in the history stack. For example, it could look like:

// visit page A

[
  { path: '/', uuid: 1 }
]

// visit page B

[
  { path: '/about', uuid: 2 },
  { path: '/', uuid: 1 }
]

// visit page A

[
  { path: '/', uuid: 3 },
  { path: '/about', uuid: 2 },
  { path: '/', uuid: 1 }
]

// click back button

[
  { path: '/about', uuid: 2 },
  { path: '/', uuid: 1 }
]

Drawbacks

• The property access is writable

Alternatives

The purpose for this behavior is to enable scroll position libraries. There are two other solutions in the wild. One is in the guides that suggests resetting the scroll position to (0, 0) on each new route entry. The other is ember-memory-scroll which I believe is better suited for tracking scroll positions for components rather than the current page.

However, in both cases neither solution provides the experience that users have come to expect from server-rendered pages. The browser tracks scroll position and restores it when you revisit the page in the history stack. The scroll position is unique even if you have multiple instances of the same page in the stack.

Unresolved questions

None at this time.