I have a Durandal App in an asp.net mvc project. It all works great but a few people mentioned the navigation didn't work. I then noticed that they were clicking on the links BEFORE the app was ready and the router was ready.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can prevent the navigation being available until the app is ready?
You can throw up a full-screen scrim (or a block UI, as some people call it) that sits at a very high z-index, covering all content. You can even put a spinner within this scrim at the same z-index.
In the compositionComplete handler of your shell's viewModel, you can then hide the scrim. This proceeds on the assumption that the completion of routing and composition should signal the availability of your app. Bear in mind, though, that if you have AJAX calls (in the form of fetching data, etc.) that could tie up your app, you may need to align hiding the scrim to the completion of those calls instead. That should happen no earlier than compositionComplete.
The last sentence is a bit a tricky. Most of the time, you're fetching data in the activate handler, which is handled earlier than compositionComplete. There's no way to know if the AJAX fetch will complete before or after 'compositionComplete'. In these cases, it might make more sense to move the AJAX fetch to the compositionComplete handler so that you can better coordinate and time the hiding of the scrim to the completion of routing, composition, and fetching.