🍕 Buy me a pizzaNalu.Maui

Nalu.Maui provides a set of classes to help you with everyday challenges encountered while working with .NET MAUI.

The very first citizen is the MVVM navigation service, which is a simple and powerful way to navigate between pages and pass parameters. The navigation system is based on Shell so you can leverage the simplicity of defining the flyout menu, tabs, and root pages. At the same time Nalu.Maui provides a set of extension methods to simplify the navigation between pages.

The navigation API is designed to be simple and easy to use, and it features Relative and Absolute navigation.

Typed Navigation API

// Push the page registered with the DetailPageModel
await _navigationService.GoToAsync(Navigation.Relative().Push<DetailPageModel>());
// Navigate to the `SettingsPageModel` root page
await _navigationService.GoToAsync(Navigation.Absolute().ShellContent<SettingsPageModel>());

You can also pass type-checked parameters to the page model you are navigating to.

// Pop the page and pass a parameter to the previous page model
// which should implement `IAppearingAware<MyPopIntent>`
await _navigationService.GoToAsync(Navigation.Relative().Pop().WithIntent(new MyPopIntent()));

And you can easily unit test your navigation logic.

var expectedNavigation = Navigation.Relative().Push<DetailPageModel>();
navigationSevice.Received().GoToAsync(Arg.Is<Navigation>(n => n.Matches(expectedNavigation)));

Intuitive Asynchronous Navigation Lifecycle Events

On top of that it provides a set of interfaces to react to navigation lifecycle events and it takes care of disposing all the resources when the page is popped. The navigation system awaits every navigation lifecycle event, so you can safely perform asynchronous operations with real async ValueTask methods instead of relying on async void ones.

Navigation.Relative()
    .Push<ContactsPageModel>()
    .Push<ContactDetailPageModel>()

There’s also a “navigation guard” feature that allows you to prevent the navigation to happen if a condition is not met. You can leverage that to ask the user to confirm leaving the page.

// Starting from: RootPageModel > ContactsPageModel > ContactDetailPageModel
Navigation.Absolute()
    .ShellContent<RootPageModel>()

Leak detection

Nalu.Maui automatically detects and reports memory leaks when the debugger is attached. An alert dialog will be shown when your Page was not collected after navigating away.

In the above example the leak detection on ContactsPageModel, ContactDetailPageModel and their respective Pages triggers after the navigation completed (root page appears).

Read more

Documentation on this website is coming soon with a lot of examples and best practices.

In the meantime, you can check the Nalu.Maui GitHub repository’s README which contains all the information you need to get started.

Call Dispose() on Page and ViewModel when the page is popped

If you’re here just because you want page/vm disposal on the standard NavigationPage or Shell and you don’t want these awesome features, you can just use the following methods to enable calling Dispose on page models after page has been removed from navigation stack.

NavigationPage

MainPage = new NavigationPage(new MainPage()).ConfigureForPageDisposal();

Shell

MainPage = new AppShell().ConfigureForPageDisposal();

Note: shell content pages will not be disposed.