Navigation Graphs

Keeping track of complex UI flows can be challenging for software companies. Many programs have an implicit navigation graph, the structure that determines how one screen leads to another, embedded in procedural code.

At Google IO 2018, an Android Navigation Architecture Component was introduced. The underlying idea is that the UI flows a user experiences should be disentangled from the Java/Kotlin code driving the interactions. Google provides a way to specify these flows as a static file bundled with the application, in the form of an XML resource file.

In the example below, the “action” elements serve as edges in a directed graph, while the “id” and “destination” attributes provide the node identities.

Of course, this isn’t a new idea in general. This concept underlies Web navigation. The Web is a bit more powerful, as it provides globally unique identifiers for the nodes in the graph.

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