As you can see in this Plunker I've added 3 more states to an Ionic side-menu starter template. Clicking on the menu item calendar, the abstract state, app.calendar, is called by his children state app.calendar.a, the abstract state has a resolve: configuration object that fetch data based on a default parameter, if nothing is provided,(I tried to add params:{year:{value:'2015'}} but I get Error: Invalid params in state 'app.calendar'). So in this case I'm unable to give a default value useful for the resolve function. Moreover when you click on the goto state B button, you reach the new state only after the second transition.