I've written part of a web application in Angular. To ensure that all routes are covered, I wanted to add a redirectTo property to the $routeProvider, so that invalid routes are returned to the root of the web application, which doesn't use Angular.

I tried:

$routeProvider.otherwise({

    redirectTo: '/'

});

but obviously this only routes in the Angular controlled portion of the URL, so users would be redirected to a URL like http://app.com/angular-part-of-web-app#, instead of http://app.com, where I'd like them to go.

I've worked around this by having a blank partial to act as a '404' page, and then a controller which just uses the $window object to redirect to the desired page:

routes.js

// Redirect to site list.

$routeProvider.when('/404', {

    templateUrl: '/partials/404.html',

    controller: 'RedirectCtrl'

});



// Redirect to the 404 page.

$routeProvider.otherwise({

    redirectTo: '/404'

});

controllers.js

// Controller to redirect users to root page of site.

.controller('RedirectCtrl', ['$scope', '$window', function ($scope, $window) {



    $window.location.href = '/';

}]);

However, this is setting off the 'too hacky, must be a better way' alarm bells. Is there a better way to do this in Angular?

EDIT: Angular routes - redirecting to an external site? didn't yield an answer to the same question. I'm going to leave my question open instead of marking it as a duplicate (for now), as with the Angular world moving so fast, the previous answer may no longer be the case.