Navigation events
You can listen to various events emitted by React Navigation to get notified of certain events, and in some cases, override the default action. There are few core events such as focus
, blur
etc. (documented below) that work for every navigator, as well as navigator specific events that work only for certain navigators.
Apart from the core events, each navigator can emit their own custom events. For example, stack navigator emits transitionStart
and transitionEnd
events, tab navigator emits tabPress
event etc. You can find details about the events emitted on the individual navigator's documentation.
Core events¶
Following are the events available in every navigator:
focus
¶
This event is emitted when the screen comes into focus.
For most cases, the useFocusEffect
hook might be appropriate than adding the listener manually. See this guide for more details to decide which API you should use.
blur
¶
This event is emitted when the screen goes out of focus.
state
¶
This event is emitted when the navigator's state changes. This event receives the navigator's state in the event data (event.data.state
).
beforeRemove
¶
This event is emitted when the user is leaving the screen, there's a chance to prevent the user from leaving.
Listening to events¶
There are multiple ways to listen to events from the navigators. Each callback registered as an event listener receives an event object as its argument. The event object contains few properties:
data
- Additional data regarding the event passed by the navigator. This can beundefined
if no data was passed.target
- The route key for the screen that should receive the event. For some events, this maybeundefined
if the event wasn't related to a specific screen.preventDefault
- For some events, there may be apreventDefault
method on the event object. Calling this method will prevent the default action performed by the event (such as switching tabs ontabPress
). Support for preventing actions are only available for certain events liketabPress
and won't work for all events.
You can listen to events with the following APIs:
navigation.addListener
¶
Inside a screen, you can add listeners on the navigation
prop with the addListener
method. The addListener
method takes 2 arguments: type of the event, and a callback to be called on the event. It returns a function that can be called to unsubscribe from the event.
Example:
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Normally, you'd add an event listener in React.useEffect
for function components. For example:
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The unsubscribe
function can be returned as the cleanup function in the effect.
For class components, you can add the event in the componentDidMount
lifecycle method and unsubscribe in componentWillUnmount
:
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One thing to keep in mind is that you can only listen to events from the immediate navigator with addListener
. For example, if you try to add a listener in a screen that's inside a stack that's nested in a tab, it won't get the tabPress
event. If you need to listen to an event from a parent navigator, you may use navigation.getParent
to get a reference to parent navigator's navigation prop and add a listener.
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Here 'MyTabs'
refers to the value you pass in the id
prop of the parent Tab.Navigator
whose event you want to listen to.
listeners
prop on Screen
¶
Sometimes you might want to add a listener from the component where you defined the navigator rather than inside the screen. You can use the listeners
prop on the Screen
component to add listeners. The listeners
prop takes an object with the event names as keys and the listener callbacks as values.
Example:
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You can also pass a callback which returns the object with listeners. It'll receive navigation
and route
as the arguments.
Example:
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screenListeners
prop on the navigator¶
You can pass a prop named screenListeners
to the navigator component, where you can specify listeners for events from all screens for this navigator. This can be useful if you want to listen to specific events regardless of the screen, or want to listen to common events such as state
which is emitted to all screens.
Example:
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Similar to listeners
, you can also pass a function to screenListeners
. The function will receive the navigation
prop and the route
prop for each screen. This can be useful if you need access to the navigation
object.
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