Composable Navigation: Unification

Stephen: So this is all looking really incredible. We have substantially improved the sheet navigation tool we built previously by making sure that child effects are automatically torn down when the child feature goes away, and we provided a new tool that allows child features to dismiss themselves in a really lightweight way. It can be entirely encapsulated in the child feature. The parent doesn’t need to know about it at all.

And on top of that we dipped our toes into non-exhaustive testing. This tool is becoming more and more important because we keep making it easier to compose features together, and so there are going to be more times we want to write high level tests on how features interact with each other without needing to assert on literally everything happening in each feature.

Brandon: There are even more powerful features we could continue adding to these presentation APIs, and we will soon, but let’s also take a moment to remember how we got here. A few episodes back we first dipped our toes into the waters of new navigation APIs by creating some tools for alerts. And since then we have basically copied and pasted code a bunch of times, first for confirmation dialogs and then again for sheets.

Let’s finally start unifying these APIs because soon we will want to generalize them even further for popovers, fullscreen covers, and navigation links, and I don’t think we want to copy-and-paste code 3 more times.