Should there be one navigation - NavigationView?

[pomianowski]

Hey guys,
to make breaking changes as much as possible controlled I would like to ask if at this stage you think that there should be one navigation control - NavigationView.

Giving a bit of a wider perspective, when creating the current navigation, I did not follow WinUi but my own implementations created for the needs of other projects. While it made sense for a small scope of apps now I can see that there are too many use cases that I have not considered.

Control

NavigationView would have a presenter - Frame or some other presenting control and a Breadcrumb included.
It should be a whole and not require additional controls. All this to keep everything as simple as possible.

For example:

<ui:NavigationView
  PaneStyle="Compact"
  PaneDisplayMode="Left"
  TransitionType="FadeInWithSlide"
  IsBackEnabled="True"
  IsBackButtonVisible="True"
  IsBreadcrumbVisible="True"
  MenuItems="{Binding}"
  FooterMenuItems="{Binding}"
  Navigated="OnNavigated">
  <ui:NavigationView.Header>
    <!-- Alternate way to create a breadcrumb? -->
  </ui:NavigationView.Header>
  <ui:NavigationView.Breadcrumb>  <!-- Accept object or FrameworkElement ? -->
    <ui:Breadcrumb
      FontSize="12" />
  </ui:NavigationView.Breadcrumb>
  <ui:NavigationView.Content>
    <!--
      Custom content rendered above the content of the page,
      may be breadcrumb or whatever else you like
      maybe dialog or snackbar? -->
  </ui:NavigationView.Content>
</ui:NavigationView>

NavigationView.PaneDisplayMode = PaneDisplayMode.Top; // Top / Left

NavigationView.SelectedItem; // Instead of the currently used property - Current

Parameters named similarly to Win Ui NavigationView - MenuItems instead of Items and FooterMenuItems instead of Footer.

Instead of NavigationStore or NavigationCompact class, we could use PaneStyle="Compact" - Compact / Store / Fluent.

Hamburger button

Hamburger button and Back button can be in title bar or the navigation itself. This is also a problem that should be solved. Should TitleBar implement a property like Navigation="{Bind RootNav}" or maybe a new NavigationControls control that could be placed in TitleBar.Header.

Frame

And the issue of rendering the control itself. We can skip the whole Frame control related stuff and simply use ContentPresenter or ScrollViewer. This will reduce the total number of rendered elements but the effect will be the same. Anyway, the most common way to create page objects is to do it before entering them in Frame.

I would be grateful for your suggestions and comments.

[IvanDmitriev1]

What about #327 ?

[PierreLeGit]

Hello Lepo,

Current navigation is fine. However, the animation of the navigation banner suffers from slowing down when opening the pages, which unfortunately is not very pretty. I have already created issues that have remained unanswered. For me, this inconvenience should already be resolved. The breadcumd is a good idea but it must remain a separate control, whether we have the choice to use it or not. The Hamburger icon must be present if you decide to hide the current navigation banner. The back button in the title bar would be really nice!

[pomianowski]

Hello Lepo,

Current navigation is fine. However, the animation of the navigation banner suffers from slowing down when opening the pages, which unfortunately is not very pretty. I have already created issues that have remained unanswered. For me, this inconvenience should already be resolved. The breadcumd is a good idea but it must remain a separate control, whether we have the choice to use it or not. The Hamburger icon must be present if you decide to hide the current navigation banner. The back button in the title bar would be really nice!

Solving the problem of navigation slowing is not trivial as everything has to happen in one thread. If you know a solution or have seen a implementation that provides decent performance when rendering a large number of controls, feel free to share.

[MajorXAML]

Well, I would suggest just using the navigation from ModernWpf. Of course by upgrading it to winui3.

[PierreLeGit]

Hello Lepo,
Current navigation is fine. However, the animation of the navigation banner suffers from slowing down when opening the pages, which unfortunately is not very pretty. I have already created issues that have remained unanswered. For me, this inconvenience should already be resolved. The breadcumd is a good idea but it must remain a separate control, whether we have the choice to use it or not. The Hamburger icon must be present if you decide to hide the current navigation banner. The back button in the title bar would be really nice!

Solving the problem of navigation slowing is not trivial as everything has to happen in one thread. If you know a solution or have seen a implementation that provides decent performance when rendering a large number of controls, feel free to share.

This wpf app showing perfect performances
https://spiegelp.github.io/MaterialDesignExtensions/
I’ve tried to implement into wpfui but for me some knowledge or Time missing… so i’ll try It again. The disavantage is that navigation banner cannot be show in the Visual studio graphic editor because page are instanciate in array in code behind. However, the result is great with many kinds kind of content, especialy heavy.

[PierreLeGit]

Say me what do you think about that 😉

[PierreLeGit]

I've seen wpf project who use frame for content and the project contain just one page and the navigation baner is 100% fluid during page opening. This is maybe the right choise tu have reactive app.

[MajorXAML]

Of course NavigationView.
By sticking to winui you can forget about writing documentation, because it's already there