Named routes/Aliasing system for easier navigation

[ferretwithaberet]

Other routers (e.g. Vue Router) have the option of specifing a name property in the route options, this allows us to do stuff like navigate({ name: "profile", params: { userId: 1 } }) instead of navigate({ to: "/account/profile", params: { userId: 1 } }).

The claimed benefits of this, from the above Vue Router link are:

• No hardcoded URLs.
• Automatic encoding of params.
• Avoids URL typos.
• Bypassing path ranking, e.g. to display a lower-ranked route that matches the same path.

The main benefit for me is no hardcoded URLs, as then we could move routes around without having to update navigate() calls.

[schiller-manuel]

Thanks for raising this idea!

I discussed this with @chorobin, here is a quick summary:

• as you pointed out already, the only real benefit is "no hardcoded urls", everything else is already in place.
• tanstack router already has a similar concept to name, you can give a route a custom id
• however, file based routes do not support this custom id as the id is auto generated.
• for this to work with file based routes, code generator would need to read the route definition AST and extract the id, and use it instead of auto generating it
• with virtual file based routes it could be easier to support this
• additionally, runtime would need to support this. most likely, another property than to would be needed to express you want to navigate based on an id instead of a path.
• relative paths would probably not be supported

This needs more thought put into. As of now, this would be "nice to have" but not a priority feature.