Named Views

Sometimes you need to display multiple views at the same time instead of nesting them, e.g. creating a layout with a sidebar view and a main view. This is where named views come in handy. Instead of having one single outlet in your view, you can have multiple and give each of them a name. A router-view without a name will be given default as its name.

<router-view class="view one"></router-view>
<router-view class="view two" name="a"></router-view>
<router-view class="view three" name="b"></router-view>

A view is rendered by using a component, therefore multiple views require multiple components for the same route. Make sure to use the components (with an s) option:

const router = new VueRouter({
  routes: [
    {
      path: '/',
      components: {
        default: Foo,
        a: Bar,
        b: Baz
      }
    }
  ]
})

A working demo of this example can be found here (opens new window).

Nested Named Views

It is possible to create complex layouts using named views with nested views. When doing so, you will also need to name nested router-view components used. Let's take a Settings panel example:

/settings/emails                                       /settings/profile
+-----------------------------------+                  +------------------------------+
| UserSettings                      |                  | UserSettings                 |
| +-----+-------------------------+ |                  | +-----+--------------------+ |
| | Nav | UserEmailsSubscriptions | |  +------------>  | | Nav | UserProfile        | |
| |     +-------------------------+ |                  | |     +--------------------+ |
| |     |                         | |                  | |     | UserProfilePreview | |
| +-----+-------------------------+ |                  | +-----+--------------------+ |
+-----------------------------------+                  +------------------------------+

• Nav is just a regular component
• UserSettings is the view component
• UserEmailsSubscriptions, UserProfile, UserProfilePreview are nested view components

Note: Let's forget about how the HTML/CSS should look like to represent such layout and focus on the components used.

The <template> section for UserSettings component in the above layout would look something like this:

<!-- UserSettings.vue -->
<div>
  <h1>User Settings</h1>
  <NavBar/>
  <router-view/>
  <router-view name="helper"/>
</div>

The nested view components are omitted here but you can find the complete source code for the example above here (opens new window).

Then you can achieve the layout above with this route configuration:

{
  path: '/settings',
  // You could also have named views at the top
  component: UserSettings,
  children: [{
    path: 'emails',
    component: UserEmailsSubscriptions
  }, {
    path: 'profile',
    components: {
      default: UserProfile,
      helper: UserProfilePreview
    }
  }]
}

A working demo of this example can be found here (opens new window).