Introduction

Ever since it has been clear that the industry has chosen AngularJS as the JavaScript based client side framework among others (Ember is good too, don’t yell at me please), I have been learning and beefing up my skills on it. Coming from a C, Java, ASP/VBScript/JavaScript, ASP.Net/C#/VB.Net background working with something like AngularJS is a serious shock like being dropped into ice water unexpectedly because it uses my least favorite scripting language of all time JavaScript
This article is focusing on a seemingly obvious and stupid gotcha, but if you are a beginner like myself it really wasn’t obvious at first. This is a head-palm worthy gotcha because it just isn’t gleamingly clear what the issue is until you realize it.

The Problem


It’s clearly telling you what the problem is, but it isn’t obvious if you are new to AngularJS

The above error reads:

Error: Could not resolve ‘myTasks1’ from state ‘myTasks’

Before we continue please consider the following:

  • I am only highlighting the first line because the stack trace really doesn’t matter and you will see why soon
  • Don’t give too much importance to that fact that it says “myTasks1” and “myTasks” because it is specific to the application I am developing for practice. 

Therefore from this chances are when you read this the first, second and twentieth time you still didn’t understand what the hell it was trying to tell you. Don’t worry you are not alone and frankly I don’t think ANYONE has done a good job at explaining it. Not even the documentation is giving you proper guidance here in my opinion.

Reiterating the error

Now let’s take that error and really explain what it is saying:

I couldn’t find the STATE you provided to the ui-sref attribute of the anchor element when looking it up in the routes that you provided in your routes.config.js

Therefore the take away from this is the ui-sref directive uses the state name of the routes you setup in your routing.config.js – you CANNOT provide a URL here like you would for a regular href because it is NOT an href.

When you are not used to all of this JavaScript black magic stuff like this is crippling for progress because yes it is entirely obvious what the issue is, but the types of answers found on StackOverflow have overwhelmingly been too complicated and not straight forward enough.

Clear Compact Example

I’m sorry that I cannot provide a complete example, but as you should know already when it comes to angular you have JS files everywhere and I am not going to copy/paste all of them here, therefore I will show some excerpts:

routes.config.js

Assuming you have a file dedicated to your routes.

$stateProvider
 .state("myTasks", {  //The NAME of your STATE
  url: "/Tasks/myTasks", //The URL to display
  controller: "MyTasksCtrl",
  templateUrl: "MyApp/partials/app.myTasks.html",
  resolve: {
   //Services and what not
  }
 })

arbitraryHtmlFile.html

The contents doesn’t matter, here is an arbitrary anchor tag for the sake of the example.

<a ui-sref="myTasks" >

The take away from this example is that ui-sref=”myTasks” is pointing to the “myTasks” state which is mapped to the “/Tasks/myTasks” URL.

If you attempt to point to the URL this will fail with the error at the top, in other words if the state doesn’t exist, then you will get an error.

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