Questions on popping to a specific screen

[realprabs]

Here's how my navigation stack looks:

Native screen -> Path 1 -> Path 2 -> Path 3 -> Path 4

Now, I want to navigate from Path 4 to Path 2. How can I do that?

My personal opinion is that if a visit is proposed to a URL which exists in the navigation stack, it should automatically pop to that screen and reload.

[leonvogt]

As far as I know, there is currently no way to pop to a specific screen.
We were in a very similar situation and ended up implementing something similar to the existing server driven routes.

We use it like this:

def update
  # ... 
  pop_until_or_redirect_to path_2
end

• On the Native side, we use a route decision handler to pop until we find an existing screen that matches the path. If we don’t find it, we push the requested path.
• On the Desktop side, we do a standard redirect to the path.

Both Hotwire Native projects already have some code to prevent the previous screen from being pushed again (here in Android and here in iOS).
For example, if you redirect to "Path 3," it would pop the fragment of "Path 4".

But this only works for the previous screen. In my opinion, having a way to pop further down to a specific screen would be really valuable. It feels unintuitive to push a view onto the stack when it has already been visited. Interestingly, iOS already has a built-in function for this: popToViewController

We thought about making a PR for this, haven't done so yet since we're unsure whether this behavior is desirable in every scenario.

I've tried to give more attention to the apps I use daily, and most of them do indeed pop back when presenting the same screen again.
However, I’ve also encountered some that don’t, which resulted in a large backstack filled with duplicate views. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not.

Another question I’m unsure about—if we were to make this the default—is how to handle params.
Should a view only be considered identical if the params also match, or does that not matter?
Theoretically, you could have a visually different view with different params, meaning you might not always want to pop back. 🤷‍♂️

I would love to see support for this in Hotwire Native, perhaps instead of making this the default behavior, it could be an optional feature that developers can enable or disable as needed?

[realprabs]

Yes, an optional config would be great. Something like Hotwire.config.shouldPopIfInBackstack = true to enable this behaviour.

[MichalSznajder]

I have another problem in this area. I have web shop app so I need something like this:

Native screen -> Path 1 -> Path 2 -> Path 3 -> Path 4 -> jump to external WebView

When payment is done deep link goes back to my app and I need stack to look like this:

Native screen -> Payment Summary

Maybe some API to set stack manually would help in both cases?