Feature: pass a callback to a state when navigating to it

[kvcrawford]

Use Case

I have a widgets resource, with a state to create and edit them. This state may be navigated to from multiple contexts, one of which is a campaign-create state. When creating a campaign, the user must either (a) select a widget, or (b) create one. If the user elects to create one, they are navigated to widget-create.

On successful creation, the new widget must be added to a local storage bucket used by campaign-create, and then navigated back to campaign-create. These are very much the concerns of the campaign-create controller, and it would be best implemented there.

If I had callbacks at my disposal, I could do something like this

$state.go('widget-create', {
  success: function(widget) {
    localStorageService.set('widget', widget);
    $state.go('campaign-create');
  }
}

[nateabele]

Controllers are really intended to be thin layers that bind business objects to UI. If you're trying to compose a specific UI flow, you're better off creating a separate service to handle the navigation that's callable from your controller, and can return a promise that resolves to the selected (or created) widget.

We use promises across the board for async control flow, so introducing callbacks would be a pretty big inconsistency.