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Vue Single page app Router, what happens with the components when we change route?


Let's suppose I have a component called FirstPage, which is my default route, now FirstPage triggers an asynchronous call, with the help of an action of the vuex store, to be made each minute to a backend Api (it's triggered when the component is loaded as a route), now let's say I go to an about route that goes to an About component, is FirstPage still making the calls?

Edit:
I'm not developing an app with that yet, so I can't provide examples.
It's on my interest to know the behavior in these cases of the router, because whenever I change the route I would want to stop making the constant calls (as they won't be necessary).
The reason is that Depending on this I'd have to switch tooling for a project I have in mind.


Solution

  • In general, a component's instance will be destroyed when you navigate away from it. However, there are two exceptions to this ..

    1. When you use routes with params. From the Vue Router docs

    One thing to note when using routes with params is that when the user navigates from /user/foo to /user/bar, the same component instance will be reused. Since both routes render the same component, this is more efficient than destroying the old instance and then creating a new one. However, this also means that the lifecycle hooks of the component will not be called.

    1. When you wrap your router-view component within a keep-alive element. Since the <router-view> is essentially a dynamic component.

    Generally Vue does a very good job of housekeeping and cleaning up after a component's instance when it gets destroyed. But sometimes you'll have to do some manual cleanup, especially if you use some kind of external library. This is usually handled in the beforeDestroy hook of an instance's lifecycle.