Composable Navigation: Destinations

Stephen: OK, I feel like we’ve said this too many times in this series of episodes but we can’t help say it again: this stuff is really incredible.

We have now built tools to support 6 different forms of navigation: alerts, confirmation dialogs, sheets, popovers, covers and now navigation links. Sure, it was the deprecated form of navigation links, but it’s still really impressive stuff.

If you’re willing to put in a little bit of upfront domain modeling work when building your features, then you get to treat all of these forms of navigation as all basically the same thing. You just have some optional state, you invoke a reducer operator to integrate a child feature with the parent, and you invoke a method in the view layer to integrate a child view with the parent.

Brandon: But once you do that there are massive benefits. Parent and child domains get a really simple way to communicate with each other. Just a moment ago we saw that the parent inventory feature could instantly see every edit made to an item inside the ItemFormFeature, and used that power in order to update the items collection instantly. And deep linking basically just comes along for free.

Testing is another super power that is unlocked once you perform the upfront work. We’ve seen this time and time again so far in this series, but let’s do it again.