Adding navigation to WinRT JavaScript

In the previous post we looked at the anatomy of a basic WinRT JavaScript navigation application. In this post we will add 2 additional pages and navigate between them. I will use the same fragment navigation as used in default.html and homePage.html.

First thing I'll do - just to spare me some typing work - is make two copies of homePage.html and call these page2.html and page3.html. Next, I'll alter the default content of homePage.html (there where it says 'content goes here') and replace it with two link tags. I'll add the same content to page2 and 3 as well, so as to easily navigate between all three pages.

<section role="main" aria-label="Main content">
    <p>
        <div>Navigate to: &lt;/div>
        <div>
            <a href="page2.html">Page 2</a>
            <a href="page3.html">Page 3</a>
        </div>
    </p>
</section>

When you try this out, you can actually navigate to page2 and 3. That wasn't too hard to do, now was it. Only downside with this app is, that the back button is not functioning (it stays disabled both on page2 and page3). The appbar as well is not popping up when you click your right mouse button. Also, when you look at it, the contents of pages 2 and 3 are not shown right, they are shown too far to the left. Obviously we need to add some extra code to fix all this.

So I started to play around with this little application, to see what could be done to get it functioning correctly. First thing I did, was add some breakpoints to the default.js file's navigated function. This showed me that, when clicking the page2 or page3 link, the navigated event was not being hit. Apparently, using a simple a tag with an href attribute doesn't trigger navigation. This had to be done some other way then.

For this I added some extra code to the homePage.js file.

function fragmentLoad(elements, options) {
    WinJS.UI.processAll(elements)
        .then(function () {
            // TODO: Initialize the fragment here.
            var page2Nav = document.getElementById('page2Nav');
            if (page2Nav) {
                page2Nav.addEventListener('click', function () {
                    WinJS.Navigation.navigate('/html/page2.html');
                }, false);
            }
        });
}

The fragmentLoad function is called when the homePage gets loaded. When this happens, we get hold of the page2Nav element (I added an id to the link element). If we find this element, we add an eventlistener for its click event. When clicked, we should navigate to page2.html. A similar piece of code can be added to navigate to page3.

After adding this, you will notice that after you click the page2 link, the navigated event in default.js is being hit. That's what we wanted. But wait, as it gets hit, the application doesn't find our back button, its value stays null. That's not right, it should be able to find the back button.

The thing that's wrong here is the fact I added an href to my a tags. If you remove this and let WinJS just handle all of the navigation, you will see the back button is being found. Now, if you land on page2, the back button can be used to navigate back to the homePage. Even the appbar is functioning as expected.

As cool as this is (hey, I can navigate), the downside of using these techniques is that you get an awfully big buy-in into the WinRT way of building apps. When you choose to develop your applications with HTML5 and JavaScript, I think one of the reasons for your choice is portability, the fact that you can take this same code and run it on a different machine with minimal effort. That is why you should think twice when using WinRT functionality. Or, you'd better start writing wrappers for platform specific libraries. But than still ... Hey, I can navigate.