Trying to understand the differences between CanActivate and CanActivateChild

Question

So, I\'m trying to protect the access to several routes by using guards. I\'m using the following routes to do so :

const adminRoutes : Routes = [
  {
    path:          


        

Answer 1

In my view, the CanActivate is used to restrict access from a certain path and all the sub-paths and CanActivateChild is used to restrict access to a specific group inside the CanActivate path.

Example:

{
  path: 'admin',
  component: AdminComponent,
  canActivate: [AuthGuardService],
  children : [
    {
      path: 'books', component: ...,
    },
    {
      path: 'authors', component: ...,
    },
    {
      path: 'payments',
      canActivateChild: [AuthGuardService],
      children: [
        {
          path: 'list', component: ...
        },
        {
          path: 'list/:id', component: ...
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Because you need two types of validations, you cannot have two canActivate methods, so you need the canActivateChild for checking the permision inside the canActivate path. Obviously, you can create a different guard service (AuthGuardForChildrenRoutes) and still use canActivate method, but that's not the point.