When using GoRouter for declarative navigation, you'll often have to choose between:
- GOING to a route
- PUSHING a route
What is the difference between the two?
A thread. 🧵
To start off, let's consider a simple route hierarchy made of one top route with two sub-routes.
Let's also define 3 pages for our routes:
Now, suppose that we're in the HomeScreen.
From here, we can either call context.go('/detail') or context.push('/detail'), and end up with the same result.
That is, in both cases we'll have two routes in the navigation stack (home → detail).
From the detail page, we can now call context.go('/modal') or context.push('/modal').
This time the result is different:
- If we use "go", we end up with the modal page on top of the home page
- If we use "push", we end up with the modal page on top of the detail page
That's because "go" jumps to the target route (/modal) by discarding the previous route (/detail), since /modal is not a sub-route of /detail.
Meanwhile, "push" always adds the target route on top of the existing one, preserving the navigation stack.
This means that once we dismiss the modal page, we navigate back to:
- the home page, if we used "go"
- the detail page, if we used "push"
Here's a short video showing this behavior:
The bottom line?
Think of go as a way to jump to a new route. This will modify the underlying navigation stack if the new route is not a sub-route of the old one.
On the other hand, push will always push the destination route on top of the existing navigation stack.
I've cover GoRouter extensively in my Flutter course, along with many other important topics:
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