Navigation Regions and composite views

[Hyperpred]

Hello, I'm currently working on a project that dynamically creates a TreeView menu structure based on what modules the application has loaded. Basically, every piece of functionality of this program is a plugin that is loaded at runtime. When you select a tree item, I want to change the main content control to display whatever view the "plugin" needs to display.

I can load the assemblies, get their menu items, and add them to the tree. I have defined a ContentControl with a region name but am unclear on navigating the region. Based on my exploration, it appears that I might misunderstand how regions work in Uno. I come from Prism and WPF development, where defining a region sets up an area on a View where other content can be displayed. You could use multiple regions that all navigate separately to create composite views. That is to say, in prism, you Navigate a region, and it changes what content is displayed in that region.

It appears, based on documentation about Navigation Region here: https://platform.uno/docs/articles/external/uno.extensions/doc/Reference/Navigation/NavigationRegion.html, that Uno behaves differently. It looks like in Uno, a Region is a place to navigate to. So you would define your regions for something like a NavigationView, and then when you navigate TO a region, it would update the NavigationViews Content. Is my understanding correct? If that's the case, it seems like my use case is not a good one for Navigation or Regions, and I might need to roll my own system that replaces content control content.

What I was expecting to do was define a region and then, when navigating, provide a View to display in that region on navigation. It also appears the examples rely on the content's visibility for navigation. So, all possible views are defined up-front, and then visibility is toggled to navigate between them. I was looking for something that would let me unload views when you navigate to and from them. Sort of like Prisms OnNavigateTo and OnNavigateFrom methods in the INavigationAware interface.

Also, I think my question is similar to this one #13011, but looking at the Tab bar raised other questions on regions in Uno vs. Prism. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[jeromelaban]

@nickrandolph will have some insights there.

[Hyperpred]

I was able to figure out how to get this working the way I expected. It appears that Navigation with content controls works more like what I was expecting. Part of my confusion was the documentation here: https://platform.uno/docs/articles/external/uno.extensions/doc/Learn/Tutorials/Navigation/Advanced/HowTo-UseContentControl.html didn't include things like the route setup and code behind. I combined that documentation with some of the other advanced navigation documentation and was able to figure out what I was doing wrong.

[GuyMicciche]

can you set regions programmatically using c#? for example:

NavigationItems = new List<NavigationViewItem>
{
    new NavigationViewItem { Name = "Main", Content = "Main",  Icon = new SymbolIcon(Symbol.Home) },
    new NavigationViewItem { Name = "Third", Content = "Third", Icon = new SymbolIcon(Symbol.Favorite) },
    
};

// Assuming these are the region names you want to assign
string[] regionNames = { "Main", "Third" };

// Apply the region names to the items
for (int i = 0; i < NavigationItems.Count; i++)
{
    Region.SetName(NavigationItems[i], regionNames[i]);
}


NavigationViewControl.MenuItemsSource = NavigationItems;

[KWodarczyk]

can you use INavigator to navigate to a specific region ?