angular / angular/components

Hardware back button support on Mobile for Material Components

Open
#17,326 2 comments 6 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
area: many feature P3
Dominant language
TypeScript
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

#### Feature Description

Global digital report suggests that the ways in which people use the internet are evolving quickly, with mobile accounting for an ever-increasing share of our online activities. and it’s worth noting that mobile phones now account for almost half the time that people spend on the internet.

Angular Material components are already well optimized for the mobile devices, but I believe one thing is missing.

On mobile devices the native controls handles hardware back button nicely. It's very common for users to use back button to close an opened select list, close a dialog or datepicker, opened menu, or opened side menu etc on mobile, but this functionality is missing in Angular Material components.

Chrome now supports installable PWAs and Trusted Web Activities (TWA) takes PWAs to Play store.

Soon people would want to use single codebase for desktop, mobile and installable apps. And support for native gestures including back button integration would become necessity.

It would be really nice to have support for hardware back button on mobile in at least below material components:

1. Select list
2. Menu
3. Side Menu
4. Dialog
5. Datepicker

For side menu I tried handling the back button using below approach, but I believe there certainly would be a better way to handle this, and nothing matches if this support is directly added in material components:

**In template:**

```

Page 1

```
**In component:**
```
import { Location } from "@angular/common";

//called when a menu item/link is clicked
navigate(url: string) {
this.sidenav.close();
this.location.replaceState(url);
this.router.navigateByUrl(url);
}

//called when the menu opens or close
onOpenedChange(isOpened: boolean) {
this.zone.runOutsideAngular(() => {
if (isOpened) {
window.addEventListener('popstate', this.onHardwareBackButton, { passive: true });
this.location.go('side-nav');
}
else {
window.removeEventListener('popstate', this.onHardwareBackButton);
}
});
}
//called when back button is pressed
private onHardwareBackButton = () => {
this.sidenav.close();
window.removeEventListener('popstate', this.onHardwareBackButton);
};
```

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reviewing the listed Material components: select list, menu, side menu, dialog, and datepicker, along with the issue's popstate example for sidenav behavior. Determine the intended back-button interaction and scope before proposing an implementation; done should consistently close the relevant open component without requiring application-specific handlers.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
angular, typescript
Domain
frontend, mobile-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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