The application has a page with 2 to 3 category buttons. Basically, button click will pull the list of items in each category, the page should be shown once API fetched data is available.
I have designed angular 2 app routes with resolve API calls and I should not block the entire page with spinner when a page loads as we are migrating the application functionality to angular 4.
When a user clicks on one category, if the response is delayed he may click the other category. When he navigates back he would be expecting the data to be loaded in previously clicked category but Angular 2/4 cancels the route due to Navigation ID does not match with the current route
To have a better understanding, kindly see the plnkr link below. http://embed.plnkr.co/UiyhZWCl63Tfq41WY48q/
Click on the planet and people concurrently, observe that only one of the section loads and other section doesn't load the data. If you do inspect you can see NavigationCancel event is thrown
Not sure If am qualified to explain how resolver works for router on Angular 2, but just went through again their document.
So as my understanding, the resolver will help in case you want to switch the view totally and fetch the data before switching. So the data is ready the moment the route is activated. This also allows you to handle errors before routing to the component. Think of master-detail layout whereby you click into an item, it navigates to a detail view. There's no point in navigating to a detail for an id that doesn't have a record and it's better to send the user back to the list.
Your case is not a common case when you want to display different outlet base on the route. And you want the moment you click into people/planet, it will render the component directly and start fetching the data. You might want to show the placeholder 'Loading...' as well. So I suggested to use ngOnInit hook for that purpose.
Working plunker: https://embed.plnkr.co/rSEjb46WI09PsOtClJn5/