Redirection causing infinite digest loop in old android versions

[m3kka]

Overview of the Issue
Apparently this route configuration

.when('/:test*.html', { redirectTo: function () { return 'test'; }});

is causing infinite digest loop in old android version (versions that require the hashbang mode to be enabled) with new versions of angular (problem appeared since we moved to 1.3.x).

The resulting URL should be
http://myBaseUrl/#/test
but we get something like
http://myBaseUrl/test#/test.html

Angular Version
Tested on 1.3.6

Browsers and Operating System
Every browser that requires hashbang, ie, with an UA similar to:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-us; GT-I9000 Build/ECLAIR) AppleWebKit/525.10+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Mobile Safari/523.12.2

Reproduce the Error
http://jsbin.com/vifisu/1/edit?html,js,output
(Sorry Plunker is unreachable since this morning)

1. Open Chrome developer tools
2. Select old enough phone model (I used Samsung Galaxy S, SII, W)
3. Reload the page for the UA to be 'applied'
4. Click on 'Redirect' in the Output window
5. Check the browser console for the error

[m3kka]

Affects all the 1.3.x branch.

1.2.27 does not show this behaviour.

[pkozlowski-opensource]

@m3kka I'm planning to look into this issue but before I spend more time on this here is one question: what would you expect with this configuration to happen:

angular.module('app', ['ngRoute']).config(function($routeProvider, $locationProvider) {
      $routeProvider.when('/:test*.html', { redirectTo: 'test' });
      $locationProvider.html5Mode(true);
    });

I mean, it tries to redirect to non-existing route, right? What is your real-life use-case?

[m3kka]

@pkozlowski-opensource Uhm sorry left some old code from previous test.

http://jsbin.com/boruxuxawo/1/edit?html,js,output

This is stll showing the problem with more straightforward code. Sorry about that.

[julianjelfs]

Very disappointing that this keeps getting bumped. We are getting a great deal of errors caused by this regression.

[weases]

@julianjelfs yeah, same here

[mgol]

In which Android versions is this a problem? The original report mentions Android 2.1, I don't think anything below 2.3 is in any way supported.

[julianjelfs]

I don't think it's actually anything to do do with android. It's any browser that falls back to hash bang routing. Its been broken for so long now that I don't believe anyone has any intention of fixing it.

[Narretz]

Closing as an old issue. It's likely that this has been fixed in later versions, or can be handled by setting a hashPrefix in the locationProvider. And Android 2.1 is not supported, should it be only a problem on these devices.