F2F.ReactiveNavigation

You already tried PRISM and you are not convinced about it's navigation capabilities? We too! So we took the concept of navigation and created a new framework for UI navigation which is portable, asynchronous and reactive.

The basic idea is that an UI consists of regions, identified by INavigableRegion. A region can contain one or more views which are related to view models, the ReactiveViewModel. Creating, showing and closing views in a region is done using the same navigation mechanism in INavigate. You can use an IRegionAdapter for monitoring regions and perform actions on UI elements.

The navigation target is the view model, not the view. Furthermore the navigation is done explicit by using the concrete type of a view model. Each navigation request can transport additional information, the INavigationParameters.

Because F2F.ReactiveNavigation is a portable library there is no direct dependency to WPF or other UI elements. We depend on ReactiveUI which provides a portable MVVM framework. Furthermore we use Reactive Extensions.

There is a second library F2F.ReactiveNavigation.WPF which provides several extensions for WPF. For example there is a TabRegionAdapter which allows you to use a WPF TabControl as region.

Builds are available via NuGet:

• F2F.ReactiveNavigation
• F2F.ReactiveNavigation.Autofac
• F2F.ReactiveNavigation.WPF
• F2F.ReactiveNavigation.WPF.Autofac

Basic interfaces

public interface IObserveRegion
{
	IObservable<ReactiveViewModel> Added { get; }

	IObservable<ReactiveViewModel> Removed { get; }

	IObservable<ReactiveViewModel> Activated { get; }

	IObservable<ReactiveViewModel> Deactivated { get; }

	IObservable<ReactiveViewModel> Initialized { get; }
}

public interface INavigate
{
  Task RequestNavigate<TViewModel>(INavigationParameters parameters)
    where TViewModel : ReactiveViewModel;
  
  Task RequestNavigate(ReactiveViewModel navigationTarget, INavigationParameters parameters);
  
  Task RequestClose<TViewModel>(INavigationParameters parameters)
    where TViewModel : ReactiveViewModel;
  
  Task RequestClose(ReactiveViewModel navigationTarget, INavigationParameters parameters);
}

Sample

As you see in F2F.ReactiveNavigation.WPF.Sample this framework works very well with IoC containers as Autofac for controlling the lifetime of view, view model and it's dependencies.

We use a MenuBuilder for adding an entry to a Menu control. Furthermore we use a TabRegionAdapter for adapting the view models of a MultiItemsRegion to a TabControl.