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Lightning Component Navigation in Summer 18

Introduction

In my last but one post (Toast Message from a Visualforce Page) I explained how I needed to solve the problem due to the force:createRecord event not respecting overrides, instead always opening the standard modal-style form and there was no GA mechanism to navigate to a component, force:navigateToComponent being still in beta.

A couple of days after, the Summer 18 release notes came out in preview and towards the end I saw that there was finally a solution for this.

lightning:isUrlAddressable Interface

The new lightning:isUrlAddressable interface allows me to expose a Lightning Component via a dedicated URL. I simply implement this on my component and my component is available at the (current) URL :

   https://<instance>.lightning.force.com/lightning//cmp/<namespace>__<component name>

However, one thing we can be certain of with Lightning Components is change, so rather than hardcoding the URL to my component, there’s a way to get the platform to dynamically generate it.

lightning:navigation Component

The new lightning:navigation component is a headless (i.e. does not have a user interface aspect) service component that exposes methods to help with navigation. The method that I’m interested in is navigate(PageReference). Using this I can create a PageReference JavaScript object that describes the location I want to navigate to and leave it up to the lightning:navigation component to figure out the appropriate URL to hit. 

The beauty of using this mechanism is that my components are decoupled from the URL format. If the Lightning Components team decide the change this, it has no impact on me - the Lightning Navigation component gets updated and everything still works as it always did.

Example

Note - as these features are part of Summer 18, at the time of writing they aren’t available outside of pre-release orgs, which was where I created my example.

I’ve created a component (WebinarOverride)that implements lightning:actionOverride, so that I can use it to override the default new action, just to show that it has no effect, and lightning:isUrlAddressable so that I can navigate to it.

<aura:component implements="force:appHostable,flexipage:availableForAllPageTypes,force:hasRecordId,lightning:actionOverride,lightning:isUrlAddressable">
	<lightning:card iconName="standard:event" title="Override">
	    <lightning:formattedText class="slds-p-left_small" 
                        value="This is the webinar override component."/>
    </lightning:card>
</aura:component>

Note that it doesn’t do anything in terms of functionality, it’s just intended to obviously identify that we’ve ended up at this component.

I then have a component that can navigate to the override called, creatively, NavigationDemo:

<aura:component implements="force:appHostable,flexipage:availableForAllPageTypes">
    <lightning:navigation aura:id="navService"/>
    <lightning:button label="Force Navigate" onclick="{!c.forceNavigate}" />
    <lightning:button label="Lightning Navigate" onclick="{!c.lightningNavigate}" />
</aura:component>

That this has two buttons - one that uses force:createRecord:

var createRecordEvent = $A.get("e.force:createRecord");
createRecordEvent.setParams({
    "entityApiName": "Webinar__c"
});
createRecordEvent.fire();

and one that uses the lightning:navigation component:

var navService = cmp.find("navService");
var pageReference = {
    "type": "standard__component",
    "attributes": {
        "componentName": "c__WebinarOverride" 
    }, 
    "state": {}
};

navService.navigate(pageReference); 

Note that as the navigation aspect is provided by a headless service component, I have to locate the components via cmp.find() and then execute the method on that. Note also my pageReference object, which has a type of standard__component (even though this is a custom component - go figure) and supplies the component name as an attribute.

I’ve overridden the Lightning Experience actions for the Webinar custom object with my WebinarOverride component:

So clicking the New button on the webinar home page takes me to the override. If I now open my NavigationDemo component:

clicking the Force Navigate button is disappointing as always:

however, clicking on the Lightning Navigate button takes me to my WebinarOverride component:

You can find the full component code at the Github repository.

Conclusion

The lightning:navigate component also retires the force:navigateToComponent() function, although it’s not clear if there was a WWE-style ladder match to determine who retired. This function has had a troubled existence, leaking out before it was ready and then being withdrawn, causing wailing and gnashing of teeth in the developer community, then entering a short beta before being deprecated. Farewell little buddy, you gave it your best shot but couldn’t cut it.

The headless component mechanism feels like the way that new functionality like this will be added, rather adding functions/events etc to the framework. I guess this keeps the framework as lightweight as it can be and doesn’t force functions on applications that don’t care about them.

One additional point to note - if you forget the lightning:isUrlAddressable interface on your target component the lightning:navigation function will still happily return the URL, but when you navigate to it you will get a not particularly helpful error message that the page isn’t supported in the Lightning Experience.

Finally, I’d still prefer force:createRecord to respect overrides. While I can make my new object component configurable via a custom setting or custom metadata type, from a low code perspective I don’t want to have to change two places to use a different one. Still, we’re in a better place that we have been for a couple of years.

Related Posts

• Toast Message from a Visualforce Page
• Lightning Component Events - Change Types with Care
• Lightning Component Events
• Lightning Components and Unobtrusive JavaScript
• Lightning Components and Custom Apex Classes
• Lightning Component Wrapper Classes
• Trailhead Unit - Handling Events with Client-Side Controllers

 

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