Standalone components loadChildren() not calling canLoad

[AbdealiLoKo]

Which @angular/* package(s) are the source of the bug?

router

Is this a regression?

No

Description

Moving this SO question to the angular tracker.

I was trying to use standalone components instead of modules based on the "Virtual NgModule mental model" described in #43784

I had a module which had just 1 component in it, and decided to replace that with the standalone component instead

On doing that, I noticed that the canLoad guard was not getting called.
And after some searching saw that in the loadComponent PR the last point mentioned was:

CanLoad guards do not apply to loadComponent. canActivate should be used instead, just like you would do if it were simply component instead.

I could not find this mentioned anywhere in the documentation, I checked:

• Lazy Loading a Standalone Component
• loadComponent
• canLoad / canLoadFn
• canMatch / canMatchFn

I couldn't conclude if this is an expected behavior or a bug ...
And if expected is this something planned for standalone components or am I using standalone components for something it should not be using

Please provide a link to a minimal reproduction of the bug

https://stackblitz.com/edit/angular-standalone-component-canload

Please provide the exception or error you saw

No response

Please provide the environment you discovered this bug in (run ng version)

Angular CLI: 15.2.2
Node: 16.18.1
Package Manager: npm 9.6.0
OS: linux x64

Angular: 15.2.2
... animations, cli, common, compiler, compiler-cli, core, forms
... language-service, platform-browser, platform-browser-dynamic
... router

Package                         Version
---------------------------------------------------------
@angular-devkit/architect       0.1502.2
@angular-devkit/build-angular   15.2.2
@angular-devkit/core            15.2.2
@angular-devkit/schematics      15.2.2
@schematics/angular             15.2.7
rxjs                            7.8.1
typescript                      4.9.5

Anything else?

NOTE: The original SO post says canMatch does not work either - but seemed to work for me.

Looks like canMatch() works but canLoad() does not work from my experiments in: https://stackblitz.com/edit/angular-standalone-component-canload

[JeanMeche]

Hi, just quoting the source code :

  // Note that `canLoad` is only checked as a condition that prevents `loadChildren` and not
  // `loadComponent`. `canLoad` guards only block loading of child routes by design. This
  // happens as a consequence of needing to descend into children for route matching immediately
  // while component loading is deferred until route activation. Because `canLoad` guards can
  // have side effects, we cannot execute them here so we instead skip preloading altogether
  // when present. Lastly, it remains to be decided whether `canLoad` should behave this way
  // at all. Code splitting and lazy loading is separate from client-side authorization checks
  // and should not be used as a security measure to prevent loading of code.

https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/cc286be7af31c7f999d6c469d3fd8f9becb28ce7/packages/router/src/router_preloader.ts#L113C32-L120

So the behavior you see is expected.

[AbdealiLoKo]

Understood, should that be documented in the docs ?
Or it doesn't really matter as it's deprecated anyway ?

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