How to use ng-switch as a router for my pages with ngRoute & ngView?

Question

Here is the highlevel skeleton of my Angular SPA. My application is about college degree offerings. In that engineering page has a separate left nav which is currently built

Answer 1

Not a good practice but here's what you want to do if you want to use ng-switch:

In your html, as you write for example:

<!-- don't forget to reference your app and your controller -->
<button ng-click="goTo('/page1')">Go to page 1</button>
<button ng-click="goTo('/page2')">Go to page 2</button>
<div nav ng-switch on="pagename()">
     <div ng-switch-when="'/page1'"></div>
     <div ng-switch-when="'/page2'"></div>
</div>
<div ng-view> </div> 

in js

Config your routes
app.config(['$routeProvider',
    function($routeProvider) {
        $routeProvider.
            when('/page1', {
                templateUrl: 'views/page1.html'
            }).
            when('/page2', {
                templateUrl: 'views/page2.html'
            }).
            otherwise({
                redirectTo: '/'
            });
    }])

and add the following in your controller:

$scope.pagename = function() { return $location.path(); };

    $scope.goTo = function(page){
        $location.path(page);
    }

In the html above, ng-switch will use the $location.path() variable to know which view to display.

As I said this is not a good practice, because your controller isn't suppose to deal with routes.