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So this is one heck of an edge-case I guess... Still a combination of common NextJS patterns that I've just spent way too long wrapping my head around.
/my-blogpost and clicks a link to /my-image/my-image we want to open the image without the post-contextThis pattern is well documented in the NextJS docs for parallel routing
Note how there is no content-type indicator in /my-blogpost and /my-image.
The docs assume we'll use /post/my-blogpost and /image/my-image and when that's your case, stop reading now.
What if the route-handler for all content is at app/[...slug]/page.tsx and we only know the content type after we've loaded it from CMS? (I'm doing this on hannesdiem.de )
Both the parallel routing and the route interception work on a static level, so we can not dynamically handle this.
Also, we only want to intercept some content from within some other content - even if we could place the interception inside the catch-all route, it would intercept every route, and to my knowledge there is no good way to dynamically decide "no, actually I don't want to intercept that route..." (which is probably why it's not even supported)
After trying around a lot with this (and finally landing at the solution I'll share shortly), I was like "Ok, let's just do this manually in the client..." but that then works completely against the core react-server-component idea of modern NextJS apps.
Both are solvable challenges, but felt wrong to do when the other solution is so much more elegant.
I ended up with this design:
app/
├─ [...slug]/page.tsx
│ 👆 dynamic content page
├─ @modal/
│ ├─ (.)m/[...slug]/page.tsx
│ │ 👆 renders the modal or notFound
│ ├─ default.tsx
│ 👆 always renders null
├─ (modal-fallback)/m/[...slug]/page.tsx
│ 👆 redirects to URL without /m prefix
├─ layout.tsx
│ 👆 renders children and @modal slot
/m in their route<Link href="/m/my-image">Show</Link>./m are redirected
When a user opens a modal URL like /m/my-image, they're redirected to /my-image@modal/(.)m/[...slug]/page.tsx has to mimic the rendering of [...slug]/page.tsx but inside a modal. There is no need to implement this for every content-type. Just the ones that we want to support in modals. Everything else can render notFound() and we'll never link there.Feels a bit like three core patterns of NextJS routing (catch-all routes, intercepting-routes, and parallel routes) not playing well together. I'm wondering If I miss out something.
In reality, this is even a bit more complex on my end, because I'm rendering multiple websites from within a single next-stack 💪 and at this point the file-system syntax for routing features is a DSL that would benefit so much from better documentation and debugging tools – Really much underlining the move of React-Router to go back to declare the routing in a typescript file.
Hope this helps, let me know when I've missed something, or when you've solved this differently.