RouteNav.Avalonia

RouteNav.Avalonia provides URI routing navigation for Avalonia UI. It supports a code-first, modular/extensible navigation approach with page (and dialog) primitives.

Concept

In most applications the navigation system is operated from within, i.e. clicking a button or menu item triggers the UI to rearrange. It is usually the task of the button/menu handler to perform the desired UI changes. This approach is also used in most MVVM frameworks.

RouteNav.Avalonia on the other hand inverts that approach (inside-out). All navigation is handled via a central Navigation class. URI-based Navigation is invoked by calling Navigation.PushAsync(Uri, NavigationTarget). The trigger source can again be a control (button, menu item, etc.), but it can also be an external event (e.g. URI activation). The UI update happens implicitly based on the association of the (named) NavigationStack with a NavigationContainer (i.e. a window or navigation layout). Currently, there are four layouts available: ContentPageStack (single page), NavigationPageStack (mobile-like, navigation bar with back button), TabbedPageStack (TabControl), SidebarMenuPageStack (Hamburger menu, split pane).

RouteNav.Avalonia also supports navigation with modal dialogs (and message dialogs).

Usage

During initialization all Pages are registered with the DI container of the navigation system (or manually with a custom DI container):

Navigation.UIPlatform.RegisterPage<Page1>();

We then create a NavigationStack and add pages with associated URI routes:

var stack = new NavigationPageStack("stackName", "Stack Label");
stack.AddPage<Page1>("page1");

Upon navigating to a route, i.e. /stackName/page1 (refers to Page1), the page is requested from the DI container (incl. optional DI injection of all dependencies) and pushed to the NavigationContainer for display.

The Pages and Dialogs can be constructed via XAML or other means (i.e. code-first).

Note: For multi-window (desktop) plaforms, you can enforce single-window (via Navigation.WindowManager.ForceSingleWindow) and/or overlay dialogs (via Navigation.WindowManager.ForceOverlayDialogs). On mobile (Android/iOS) and Browser platforms requesting a new window always replaces the current NavigationStack and dialogs are always displayed in page overlay (NavigationTarget.Window and NavigationTarget.Dialog behaves the same then).

Documentation

There is currently only very limited documentation (incl. API docs) available. Please refer to the DemoApp for preliminary instructions and usage examples.

License

RouteNav.Avalonia is licensed under the terms of the MIT license (http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT, see LICENSE.txt).

Disclaimer

RouteNav.Avalonia is in early stages of development and should be considered experimental.