How can I go back/route-back on vue-router?

Question

Ok, to explain this simply:

I have 3x pages.

• Page 1 (Home)
• Page 2 (Menu)
• Page 3 (About)

Page 1 has a-

<router-link to="/menu">

button that when clicked routes to "/menu".

For now, Page 2 (Menu) has a

<router-link to="/">

button and when this button is clicked it reverts to the previous location "/" Page 1 (Home).

But I don't want to create a component for router for each page to 'go back' to the previous page (as if I had 100 pages this could be a lot of work routing back). Is there a way to do this with vue-router? similar to window.history.back()

Curious to see if there is a way to do this as I can't find it in the docs.

Thanks in advance! John

Solution 1

You can use Programmatic Navigation. In order to go back, you use this:

router.go(n) 

Where n can be positive or negative (to go back). This is the same as history.back().So you can have your element like this:

<a @click="$router.go(-1)">back</a>

Solution 2

Use $router.back() directly to go back/route-back programmatic on vue-router. Or if in the template of the component use router.back().

Solution 3

This works like a clock for me:

methods: {
 hasHistory () { return window.history.length > 2 }
}

Then, in the template:

<button 
  type="button"    
  @click="hasHistory() 
    ? $router.go(-1) 
    : $router.push('/')" class="my-5 btn btn-outline-success">&laquo; 
  Back
</button>

Solution 4

If you're using Vuex you can use https://github.com/vuejs/vuex-router-sync

Just initialize it in your main file with:

import VuexRouterSync from 'vuex-router-sync';
VuexRouterSync.sync(store, router);

Each route change will update route state object in Vuex. You can next create getter to use the from Object in route state or just use the state (better is to use getters, but it's other story https://vuex.vuejs.org/en/getters.html), so in short it would be (inside components methods/values):

this.$store.state.route.from.fullPath

You can also just place it in <router-link> component:

<router-link :to="{ path: $store.state.route.from.fullPath }"> 
  Back 
</router-link>

So when you use code above, link to previous path would be dynamically generated.

Solution 5

Worked for me, short and practical. (Nuxt.js)

<a @click="$router.back()"></>

View more solutions

Comments

[yuriy636]

router.go(n) | Programmatic Navigation | vue-router

[Kartik Prasad]

@yuriy636's is probably the best answer. Currently we have and outer component with the back button which uses string manipulation on the current url to go back to the last page in the route. We will probably change to the router.go method when we get the chance now though

[John107]

Ok thanks! It was staring me right in the face! I'm not really sure how to write this into my syntax though. Sorry! I'm new to this!

[TonyGW]

this causes an infinite loop problem

[PanPipes]

Anyone had any issue with this on IE11? E.g if I open a page via router-link, click my button it goes back, however if I open the same page via router-link the router.go(-1) clears my URL but nothing happens.

[Aravindh Gopi]

I want to go back to previous page if there is no id on load, it works but on page refresh .go(-1) goes 2 pages back rather than 1 page.

[AshotN]

Noob question, is it ok that we are using a tag here instead of router-link

[Steven Soroka]

@Hego555 I believe router-link is a component that renders an a tag by default

[Titan]

This seems to ignore any url params that were in the previous url you are going back to

[pishpish]

@TonyGW No it doesn't.

[Enric A.]

If you come from another website external to your app, you think that you can go back to a previous page of your app, but you would actually leave it for an external website.

[aspirinemaga]

it's $router.back()

[Armin]

@aspirinemaga it's not if you are using it in the template of the component, if that is the case you pass it as to="router.back()"

[Roel]

Route-links are usefull to generate links to certain routes because it automatically generated the correct urls when you change history mode on or off.

[xlm]

Quasar v2 no longer provides this directive and link is now broken. It does still intercept back with a different approach. See quasar.dev/quasar-plugins/dialog#cordova-capacitor-back-butt‌​on and quasar.dev/quasar-cli/developing-capacitor-apps/…