Route Specificity related to Declaration Order

[Matt Hughes]

Given the following routes:

when("/") ...
when("/foo") ...
when("/:bar") ...
when("/baz") ...

I would think a $location of "/baz" would hit the last route, but it doesn't.  It instead matches on the :bar route.  If I switch the declaration order:

when("/baz") ...
when("/:bar") ...

it works as expected.  Shouldn't the route matcher consider constants in the path more specific than catch all route params? 

[Sander Elias]

Hi Matt,

Short answer, No.

Somewhat longer, the /:bar is a 'catch all' construct. How can it know that you don't want to handle 'baz' as an variable?
In this case it is very obvious, but if your router grows, or is build more dynamically  that might not be the case.  

Regards

Sander

[Matt Hughes]

Well, the router could take that into account, no?  If it has two routes that match and one has a literal and the other has a matcher, the literal should have precedence.

[Luke Kende]

Nope.  That's not how it works... you must specify the routes in order of literals first as Sander mentioned, and, as  you found when trying it out.  Precedence is given on first rule that matches, not on looking through all the rules and guessing what the user wants.  

[Matt Hughes]

Right.  I'm proposing a change to the algorithm.  I'll see what I come up with and see if anyone is interested in a PR.

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