Custom Navigation with Xamarin.Forms

Question

I’m working on an application for Android and iOS, which requires a certain flexibility for one or two views. That’s why we created & implemented a service that translated a basic list of objects into a user interface for both iOS & Android. But now that Xamarin.Forms is released, we decided to replace our service by the one Xamarin provides. I did succeed in creating the views with Xamarin.Forms, resulting in better looking & smoother running pages. But my problem lies in the navigation of it. Here is a little drawing on what I would like to achieve:

I would like my app to start an activity that starts with a custom fragment. After clicking a button on this fragment, I would like the page I created with the Xamarin.Forms api to be added to my current navigation stack! Once the user is finished with the Xamarin.Forms page, it navigates to a second custom fragment, all that without breaking the navigation cycle. Does anybody have an idea on how I can achieve this?

For the iOS developpers: replace Activity with NavigationController & Fragment with ViewController

Answer 1

Take a look at CarouselPage for Xamarin.Forms' own approach. It doesn't look like that's what you need but you can also look at its source code and maybe make a custom renderer yourself.

You may also want to take a look at MVVM

As for the easier/hackier way you'd want to make a button on each page and when the button is tapped execute Navigation.PushModalAsync(nextPage) - there won't be a "< Back" button any more, you may need to implement that yourself if you need it.

Answer 2

If by your meaning of 'current navigation stack' is for using the native Navigation of each platform, then remember that you don't have to use Xamarin.Forms' Navigation Model and functions such like PushAsync.

If you prefer to do Navigation with code specific to each platform then you can do this the same as normal. Just create your stub pages in each platform specific project and set the Xamarin.Forms content for each page from the shared project.

From each platform specific stub page (Activity / UIView / PhoneApplicationPage) you could then execute an Action<> call setting on the shared Xamarin.Forms page to help with the navigation, or alternatively, hook into a custom-event that is raised from the Xamarin.Forms** page back to the platform specific stub page to allow you to do navigation from there.

Like Sten mentioned there won't be any 'Back' button so you will most likely have to do that yourself.