Hey, did anyone experienced a weird behaviour of the Compose UI when open a camera from the applicat...

# compose-ios

[Andrii Yanechko]

Hey, did anyone experienced a weird behaviour of the Compose UI when open a camera from the application ?

For me, application state just resets whenever the user cancels or takes a picture using a camera, so the application just "reloads" and loses all the data, looks like application has been closed and opened again

[Andrii Yanechko]

P.S. I'm using UIImagePickerController and I see that callback of the delegate got invoked, but when the camera UI dismisses, the application just resets its state (or reloads)

[Andrii Yanechko]

P.P.S. It works perfectly with the gallery (same code, but different sourceType which is weird)

[Dennis]

Hello Andrii which navigation library are you using

[Andrii Yanechko]

Hi, I'm using my custom implementation which is basically have two classes, one for the logic part which holds destination and transition parameters using MutableStateFlow and the other one, which is more UI related, it observes the StateFlow and executes transition to a new destination by using the AnimatedContent Compose function.

The thing that even I have my "logical" part of the navigation under the remember I see in the logs that it got reinstantiated.

Here how the instantiation of the navigation "router" looks like:

@Composable
fun <D> rememberNavigationState(
    mapper: ((D) -> KClass<out ViewModel>?)? = null,
    initialConfiguration: TransitionScope.(NavigationState<D>) -> Unit = {},
    initialDestination: D,
    flowFinalizer: FlowFinalizer,
): NavigationState<D> {
    val manager = LocalViewModelManager.current
    return remember {
        NavigationState(
            initialDestination = initialDestination,
            initialConfiguration = initialConfiguration,
            viewModelExtension = mapper?.let { ViewModelExtension(manager = manager, mapping = it) },
            flowFinalizer = flowFinalizer
        )
    }
}

[Dennis]

With a life cycle aware library such as Decompose I am able to preserve the current state of the screen , i am able to open the camera and take a number of pictures while preserving the current state of the screen , the ui is not recomposed

[원석]

I’m experiencing the exact same issue.
https://github.com/TEAM-PREAT/peekaboo/issues/15

[Andrii Yanechko]

@원석, it's a compose UI bug for iOS, firstly reported here

[Thomas]

Same issue here. It seems keeping your state outside of compose seems to work. So create your navigation state outside of ComposeUIViewController and then pass it down.

[Thomas]

I wonder if there is a way to get rememberSaveable working on iOS so all state can be kept or so.

[Andrii Yanechko]

Thanks. will try thit approach

[Thomas]

@Andrii Yanechko in your case, create NavigationState outside of ComposeUIViewController

[Thomas]

But keep in mind that on Android you still need to remember it

[Thomas]

Found a way to get saveable state working (e.g. rememberSaveable) on iOS which should help a lot with this issue.

class IosSaveableStateFix {
    private var registry = SaveableStateRegistry(restoredValues = null) { true }

    @Composable
    fun Provider(
        block: @Composable () -> Unit
    ) {
        CompositionLocalProvider(LocalSaveableStateRegistry provides registry) {
            block()
        }
        DisposableEffect(Unit) {
            onDispose {
                val savedData = registry.performSave()
                registry = SaveableStateRegistry(restoredValues = savedData) { true }
            }
        }
    }
}

usage:

val saveableStateFix = IosSaveableStateFix()
return ComposeUIViewController {
    saveableStateFix.Provider {
        // your app
    }
}

This should fix most state issues because on Android you should already be using rememberSaveable for saving important state like navigation state. Compose itself already uses this a lot for all the views. If you also want to keep viewmodels you still need to save them outside ComposeUIViewController like I showed. (or maybe using rememberSaveable if only targeting iOS?)

Keep in mind I have not really tested this code that well, but it seems to work fine for me.

[Thomas]

With the above workaround, state is not lost, but saved/restored, which should be similar to how an Android app can be killed and then restored. So not perfect, but better