Back Button Support in BuildIt.Lifecycle

Previously I’ve dealt with going back to previous pages based on user interaction on the current page (eg hitting a back button that triggers an “end of state” behaviour to go back to the previous page). However, another common scenario is for the user to press tha back button, either on their device (eg the Windows Phone hardware back button) or a virtual back button (eg the virtual button that’s available to Windows 10 UWP applications either in the task tray (running in tablet mode) or in the top navigation bar, when running in desktop mode). This wasn’t currently handled, so I’ve added handlers for both the hardware back button and the virtual back button to the UWP branch of BuildIt.Lifecycle. This work isn’t totally complete because at the moment it assumes that the decision as to whether the current page supports a back operation is determined only by the root level StateManager – this may not be the case if you have a view model that has business logic that determines whether the current page can be navigated way from.

This update also supports hiding and showing the virtual back button when a UWP application is run in desktop mode eg:

image image

Leave a comment