Angularjs - Call function before page refresh?

Question

If a user hits refresh, I want to call an angular service to save their work, and upon completion of the save (asynchronous call), only then should the page refresh. How can I achieve this?

So far I've tried calling the save service outside angular, using window.onbeforeunload. But no luck. Any general advice on how to approach this? How does Angular handle page refreshes?

Answer 1

there is an event called $routeChangeStart

you can simply bind the handler when the route is about to change, it should work also for refreshing the page

$scope.$on('$routeChangeStart', function() {
    //callback
});