Deep linking¶

Users following links on devices have one goal in mind: to get to the content they want to see. Decompose provides ability to override initial destinations and back stack. A typical approach is to parse deep links on the platform side and then pass the initial data to the root component and then down the tree to all the required components.

Parsing deep links on the platform side is beyond this documentation. This information should be available in the platform's specific documentation. For example here is the related documentation for Android.

Handling deep links¶

Given the basic example from the Child Stack overview page, we can easily handle deep links. Let's say we have a link like http://myitems.com?itemId=3. When the user clicks on it, we want to open the details screen of the item with the provided id. When the user closes the details screen, they should be navigated back to the list screen. The idea is to pass parsed data from the deep link to a component responsible for navigation, in our case it is the Root component.

class RootComponent(
    componentContext: ComponentContext,
    initialItemId: Long? = null
) : Root, ComponentContext by componentContext {

    private val navigation = StackNavigation<Config>()

    private val stack =
        childStack(
            source = navigation,
            initialStack = {
                listOfNotNull(
                    Config.List,
                    if (initialItemId != null) Config.Details(itemId = initialItemId) else null,
                )
            },
            handleBackButton = true,
            childFactory = ::createChild,
        )

    // Omitted code
}

Now, if the initialItemId is supplied, the initial screen will be the ItemDetails component. The ItemList component will be in the back stack, so the user will be able to go back.