Updating data property of subroute won't propagate when subroute is not active

[timeu]

Description

Not sure if by design or a known limitation:

I have a parent route with a :page data property and a subroute with an :id property.

<carbon-location route="{{route}}"></carbon-location>
<carbon-route
    route="{{route}}"
    pattern="/:page"
    data="{{routeData}}"
    tail="{{subroute}}">
</carbon-route>
<carbon-route id="subrouter"
    route="{{subroute}}"
    pattern="/:id"
    data="{{subrouteData}}">
</carbon-route>

If I update the data property of a subroute the browser location bar won't propagate, if the subroute is not active/matched.

Expected outcome

Original URL: http://localhost:8000/somePage

this.$.subrouter.data =  {id:2};

New URL: http://localhost:8000/somePage/2

Actual outcome

Original URL = New URL = http://localhost:8000/somePage

Reason

This seems to be due to the fact that the subroute is not active and __updatePathOnDataChange will bail out early.

Workaround:

change the tail.path of the parent carbon-route instead of the data property of the subroute.

Browsers Affected

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari 9
• Safari 8
• Safari 7
• Edge
• IE 11
• IE 10

[TimvdLippe]

It should work if you use a trailing slash? http://localhost:8000/somePage/

This is indeed confusing and I also encountered with the matching in that sense

[timeu]

Yeah a trailing slash fixes it.
However IMHO this is not really a satisfying solution because I don't have a control of which URL users puts into the browser location bar and I want to avoid some brittle workaround to add a trailing slash to every URL.

Also the carbon-router itself does not add any trailing slashes itself, so if I want to navigate to a sub-route it won't work. Let's assume that the user starts at:

http://localhost:8000/

Then through databinding on the root carbon-router I change the page property to users. This will change the browser location bar to:

http://localhost:8000/users (note the missing trailing slash)

Now if I want to navigate to the detail page (i.e. http://localhost:8000/users/2) through data-binding on the id property of the sub carbon-router it does not work because of the missing trailing slash.

Maybe I am missing something obvious here.

[TimvdLippe]

Yes I encountered this too and I think issue #37 is designated to fix/clear up this behavior.

[rictic]

As designed, changes to data on inactive routes don't propagate. The thinking here is that this is the less surprising thing, as it would be easy to get into a situation where changing a property that happens to be bound into a distant carbon-route could end up with an unexpected redirect.

The subtle distinctions between /foo, /foo/ and /foo/bar here aren't great though. As Tim mentioned we're tracking that at #37 while we consider solutions.