Links

To create links to other pages within an Inertia app, you will typically use the Inertia <Link> component. This component is a light wrapper around a standard anchor <a> link that intercepts click events and prevents full page reloads. This is how Inertia provides a single-page app experience once your application has been loaded.

Creating links

To create an Inertia link, use the Inertia <Link> component. Any attributes you provide to this component will be proxied to the underlying HTML tag.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

<Link href="/">Home</Link>

By default, Inertia renders links as anchor <a> elements. However, you can change the tag using the as attribute.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

<Link href="/logout" method="post" as="button" type="button">Logout</Link>

// Renders as...
<button type="button">Logout</button>

Method

You can specify the HTTP request method for an Inertia link request using the method attribute. The default method used by links is GET, but you can use the method attribute to make POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests via links.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

<Link href="/logout" method="post" as="button">Logout</Link>

Data

When making POST or PUT requests, you may wish to add additional data to the request. You can accomplish this using the data attribute. The provided data can be an object or FormData instance.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

<Link href="/endpoint" method="post" :data="{ foo: bar }">Save</Link>

Custom headers

The headers attribute allows you to add custom headers to an Inertia link. However, the headers Inertia uses internally to communicate its state to the server take priority and therefore cannot be overwritten.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

<Link href="/endpoint" :headers="{ foo: bar }">Save</Link>

Browser history

The replace attribute allows you to specify the browser's history behaviour. By default, page visits push (new) state (window.history.pushState) into the history; however, it's also possible to replace state (window.history.replaceState) by setting the replace attribute to true. This will cause the visit to replace the current history state instead of adding a new history state to the stack.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

<Link href="/" replace>Home</Link>

State preservation

You can preserve a page component's local state using the preserve-state attribute. This will prevent a page component from fully re-rendering. The preserve-state attribute is especially helpful on pages that contain forms, since you can avoid manually repopulating input fields and can also maintain a focused input.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

<input v-model="query" type="text" />

<Link href="/search" :data="{ query }" preserve-state>Search</Link>

Scroll preservation

You can use the preserve-scroll attribute to prevent Inertia from automatically resetting the scroll position when making a page visit.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

<Link href="/" preserve-scroll>Home</Link>

For more information on managing scroll position, please consult the documentation on scroll management.

Partial reloads

The only attribute allows you to specify that only a subset of a page's props (data) should be retrieved from the server on subsequent visits to that page.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

<Link href="/users?active=true" :only="['users']">Show active</Link>

For more information on this topic, please consult the complete documentation on partial reloads.

Active states

It's often desirable to set an active state for navigation links based on the current page. This can be accomplished when using Inertia by inspecting the page object and doing string comparisons against the page.url and page.component properties.

import { Link } from '@inertiajs/vue3'

// URL exact match...
<Link href="/users" :class="{ 'active': $page.url === '/users' }">Users</Link>

// Component exact match...
<Link href="/users" :class="{ 'active': $page.component === 'Users/Index' }">Users</Link>

// URL starts with (/users, /users/create, /users/1, etc.)...
<Link href="/users" :class="{ 'active': $page.url.startsWith('/users') }">Users</Link>

// Component starts with (Users/Index, Users/Create, Users/Show, etc.)...
<Link href="/users" :class="{ 'active': $page.component.startsWith('Users') }">Users</Link>

You can perform exact match comparisons (===), startsWith() comparisons (useful for matching a subset of pages), or even more complex comparisons using regular expressions.

Using this approach, you're not limited to just setting class names. You can use this technique to conditionally render any markup on active state, such as different link text or even an SVG icon that represents the link is active.