Everything You Want to Know About Android Jetpack’s Navigation Component

What is it and how can we use it?

In Android, we generally code the navigation logic using Intent to travel between activities and fragment transactions to navigate between fragments. Google’s Navigation Architecture Component simplifies navigation in the Android app. In this piece, we discuss both the basic and the advanced way of using the Navigation component.

What Was the Problem?

When developing the apps with multiple fragments we tend to do a lot of fragment transactions to navigate between them. Writing these fragment transactions and handling the back stack takes a certain amount of effort. If you don’t implement it the right way, another major issue is the IllegalStateException that can occur.

Solution

In order to make navigation easier, Google has introduced the Navigation component. With the help of the navigation component, it will be easy to code the navigation between fragments and handling cases like back stack, exception cases, etc. Let’s start exploring the Navigation component.

What is the Navigation Component?

The Navigation component is a set of libraries, a plugin, and tooling that simplifies Android navigation. Android Jetpack’s Navigation component helps us to implement navigation, from simple button clicks to more complex patterns, such as app bars and the navigation drawer. The Navigation component also ensures a consistent and predictable user experience by adhering to an established set of principles.

The Navigation component consists of three key parts.

Navigation graph

This is a new resource type — an XML file that contains all navigation-related information in one centralized location. This includes all the individual content areas in your app, called destinations, as well as the possible paths a user can take through your app.