Know in `activate` if the navigation was due to clicking on the nav-bar - aurelia

Question

I am trying to get 3 different routing "styles" in my application. I need to identify these in each view-model's activate method:
User clicks a button or link in my app that causes my app to call this.router.navigate()
This one is easy because I always put a parameter into the URL, so in the target View-Model, I have that param in my activate method.
The users presses the back or forward buttons or loads the application for the first time.
I can also get this by using the this.router.isExplicitNavigation variable or checking if my state is uninitalized.
The user clicks on one of the views displayed in the nav-bar (setup in the app.ts configureRouter method).
Unfortunately I cannot find a way to distinguish this one from when the user presses the back and forward buttons on the browser.
So here is my question, is there a way to know when a view-model's activate method has been called because a user selected a nav-bar route?

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly, you want distinguish between 1. and 3. In activate(), you receive all routing parameters (as the method's first argument), both:
from the route-template, such as /myRoute/:myparam
from the query string
So I'd suggest to put a query parameter for the menu bar, which parameter you can read in activate(). For example:
let's say your route /myRoute
from the button, simply navigate to /myRoute
from the navbar, navigate to /myRoute?from=navbar
You might know this, but you have multiple options to navigate from code:
router.navigate('compose your route manually')
router.navigateToRoute('route's name', parameters)
in template, using <a route-href="route: 'myRoute'; params.bind={...}" >
Your code:
//button
router.navigateToRoute('my-route');
//navbar
router.navigateToRoute('my-route', {from: 'navbar'});
//destination view-model
activate(params: Object): void {
if (params.from === 'navbar')
//routed from the navbar
else
//routed from a button
}