Navigation

How do I navigate between pages?

In Xamarin.Forms, you navigate between pages normally through a CarouselPage. In Flutter, you can use a NavigationPage that manages the stack of pages to display.

Flutter has a similar implementation, using a Navigator and Routes. A Route is an abstraction for a Page of an app, and a Navigator is a widget that manages routes.

A route roughly maps to a Page. The navigator works in a similar way to the Xamarin.Forms NavigationPage, in that it can push() and pop() routes depending on whether you want to navigate to, or back from, a view.

To navigate between pages, you have a couple options:

• Specify a Map of route names. (MaterialApp)
• Directly navigate to a route. (WidgetApp)

The following example builds a Map.

void main() {
  runApp(new MaterialApp(
    home: new MyAppHome(), // becomes the route named '/'
    routes: <String, WidgetBuilder> {
      '/a': (BuildContext context) => new MyPage(title: 'page A'),
      '/b': (BuildContext context) => new MyPage(title: 'page B'),
      '/c': (BuildContext context) => new MyPage(title: 'page C'),
    },
  ));
}

Navigate to a route by pushing its name to the Navigator.

Navigator.of(context).pushNamed('/b');

The Navigator is a stack that manages your app’s routes. Pushing a route to the stack moves to that route. Popping a route from the stack, returns to the previous route. This is done by awaiting on the Future returned by push().

Async/await is very similar to the .NET implementation and is explained in more detail in Async UI.

For example, to start a location route that lets the user select their location, you might do the following:

Map coordinates = await Navigator.of(context).pushNamed('/location');

And then, inside your ‘location’ route, once the user has selected their location, pop the stack with the result:

Navigator.of(context).pop({"lat":43.821757,"long":-79.226392});

How do I navigate to another app?

In Xamarin.Forms, to send the user to another application, you use a specific URI scheme, using Device.OpenUrl("mailto://")

To implement this functionality in Flutter, create a native platform integration, or use an existing plugin, such as url_launcher, available with many other packages on pub.dev.