Angularjs Normal Links with html5Mode

I am working with angularjs in html 5 mode. Which appears to take control of all href's on the page. But what if I want to have a link to something within the same domain of the app but not actually in the app. An example would be a pdf.

If i do <a href="/pdfurl"> angular will just try to use the html5mode and use the route provider to determine which view should be loaded. But I actually want the browser to go to that page the normal way.

Is the only way to do this is to make a rule with the route provider and have that redirect to the correct page with window.location?

Solution 1:

in HTML5 mode, there are three situations in which the A tag is not rewritten: from the angular docs

• Links that contain a target attribute. Example: <a href="/ext/link?a=b" target="_self">link</a>
• Absolute links that point to a different domain Example: <a href="http://angularjs.org/">link</a>
• Links starting with '/' that lead to a different base path when base is defined Example: <a href="/not-my-base/link">link</a>

so your case would be 1. add target="_self"

Solution 2:

As of Angular v1.3.0 there is a new rewriteLinks configuration option for the location provider. This switches "hijacking" all the links on the page off:

module.config(function ($locationProvider) {
    $locationProvider.html5Mode({
        enabled: true,
        rewriteLinks: false
    });
});

While disablig this behavior for all links may not be your intention, I'm posting this for others who, like me, want to use $location in html5 mode only to change the URL without affecting all links.