Blazor: expose 'replace' parameter in NavigationManager.NavigateTo

[zbecknell]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I want to maintain some of my view state in the URL, such as the currently selected tab. I can and do use window.history.replaceState for this, but the NavigationManager.Uri is then out of sync. I'd like to be able to keep the Uri in sync, as I'm using it to help manage this state. I need to get the Uri synchronously so I can't just call location.href using interop.

Describe the solution you'd like

Simple option

I believe the simplest solution would be to make NavigationManager.Uri settable publicly so I can then perform this task myself. I don't want to have to implement my own NavigationManager just for this purpose. It is already clear in the docs that setting Uri doesn't trigger LocationChanged, which again, is my desired behavior, so hopefully making this public isn't too big of a concern.

Fancier option

The other option is to expose the replace that already exists in navigateTo() in NavigationManager.ts. However... I don't want to trigger OnParametersSet in my scenario, and I think this would do so by default. Personally, I'd like to submit a PR for the first option and leave this one on the table.

[javiercn]

@zbecknell thanks for contacting us.

I don't think we want to make the setter public, it will cause confusion between that and the NavigateTo method. Exposing the option in NavigationManager to replace the state would be the preferred approach, in fact we added that to the .ts file becasue we needed it on auth, but we couldn't add that to NavigationManager during the Blazor webassembly release.

I think this has been an oversight on our part and we should enabled the API in NavigationManager, but I don't think we can do anything about it for 5.0.

That said, I'll leave it here for consideration in our triage process.

[zbecknell]

That's certainly understandable to avoid confusion. I'll look for a workaround for the time being.

We've moved this issue to the Backlog milestone. This means that it is not going to be worked on for the coming release. We will reassess the backlog following the current release and consider this item at that time. To learn more about our issue management process and to have better expectation regarding different types of issues you can read our Triage Process.

[MariovanZeist]

I am interested in working on this issue.

As this will include an API change I will propose the following change:

A change to the NavigateTo function in the NavigationManager class
by adding an optional boolean parameter that can be set to true to replace the current Uri in the browser history.
If set to false, (or not supplied) it will do the default action and push the new Uri onto the browser history stack.

So change the function from:
public void NavigateTo(string uri, bool forceLoad = false)

To:
public void NavigateTo(string uri, bool forceLoad = false, bool replace = false)

[campersau]

Has this been fixed by #33751 ?

[SteveSandersonMS]

Why yes it has. Thanks for pointing that out!