MasterDetail and NavigationPage deeplinking in Prism Forms

3
votes

I am testing the deeplinking feature of the Prism Forms framework. I currently have a situation where I have a MasterDetailPage with a menu as Master. When I click the menu items, the Details should change to specific pages with a clean NavigationPage as container.

When I check the Sandbox example for Prism Forms, it shows an example for MasterDetail navigation, but not including navigation pages.

So I have this (absolute) deeplink structure at startup: /MasterDetailPage/NavigationPage/MyFirstPage

Then I want the second menu item to link to a fresh NavigationPage: /MasterDetailPage/NavigationPage/MySecondPage

My current workaround is to do absolute deeplinking, but I was wondering if there is a better way? The Prism PageNavigationService checks to see if the segment type is the same as the current detail type. But since these are both NavigationPages, it tries to add the new page in the already existing NavigationPage. At that moment it also kills the menu-icon (at least on iOS).

1
xamarin.formsprism

1 Answers

2
votes

Actually, the Sandbox app does use NavigationPages in the MasterDetail: https://github.com/PrismLibrary/Prism/blob/master/Sandbox/Xamarin/HelloWorld/HelloWorld/HelloWorld/Views/MyMasterDetail.xaml

Prism reuses the detail page for performance reasons, but it doesn't work like you think it does. While it does add the new page to the NavigationPage's NavigationStack, it also removes the previous page from the stack. This keeps the NavigationStack in the proper state.

The icon behavior you are seeing is because of a confirmed bug in Xamarin.Forms. You can follow the issue here: https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=41038

As soon as Xamarin fixes this bug, I will publish the fix to Nuget. In the mean time, the only way to get around this is to fork the Prism code base and remove the Page type check.