Learning about Navigation

The previous exercise was a failure to me... End up with more questions than answers.

Back to square one, let's not take too many things for granted and read the documentation

It seems there is a Navigator already provided with react-native... so, why isn't the documentation highlighting it?

I am going to split this exercise into two parts:

Part 1 Write the app just using the navigator bundled with react-native. Check its benefits and write them down.

Part 2 Rewire the app with react-navigation and check what I had wrong from the previous exercise as I could not get to work the update of list of todos. Check its benefits and write them down.

Part 1: Using the Navigator of react-native

Check git history to check for the implementation.

The short story is: once the code is written and compiled, when you run the code you get a nice red screen telling you the Navigator is depricated and you should be using react-navigation or react-native-navigation...

... Sigh.

Benefits

• Given it has been depricated. None.

Part 2: Using react-navigation

Getting started with this library was not difficult. The documentation is superb and all you need to do is to check your types as you declare some of the components used on the samples.

Once you have installed the npm module react-navigation as illustrated below, you will need to create a StackNavigator (or a TabNavigator) and provide the route and initial state for it to load the first component. In my case, it is going to be a StackNavigator to start with.

$> npm install --save react-navigation @types/react-navigation

Check the app.tsx file containing this wired up (I've described everything there).

Thankfully, the author of the type definition for react-navigation was kind enough to provide tests that were a great guide for me to understand what type I needed to provide and how to get it to work (the reset part I mean).

Notes: Going back

Not complaining about navigator.goBack(), but I do think reset to root or navigate to root should be a method exposed by the api.

Hopefully I will not forget these learning when applying it to my personal projects.

Trying out react-native-navigation

I had a little play (did not push this code up) with react-native-navigation, which has a pretty good documentation as far as I could see. Had to write the sample app in javascript as right at this moment does have a type definition file that I can easily import (maybe it does not follow the @types/react-native-navigation convension).

Now, configuring this library with your project is not as easy as react-navigation. You will need to do some change in xcode and android studio for it to work.

A comprehensive description is found here: iOS installation and here Android installation

This made me consider that I need to spend some time understanding how to create these type definition files and how easy it will be to write it myself.

I want to play with this code

Here is a script you could use to set you up (written for terminal/osx).

# Cloning the repo to 'todos'
git clone git@github.com:rodrigoelp/reactnative-typescript-exercise-4.git navscreen
# Changing directory
cd navscreen/
# Installing dependencies
yarn # if you have not installed yarn, then change it to: npm install
# Compiling the typescript code
./node_modules/.bin/tsc
# Launching the react-native development server
open -a Terminal "`react-native start`"
# Compiling the code for ios and deploying it to the simulator
react-native run-ios # optionally, type: react-native run-android