How can I navigate from the VM in jetpack compose? say I’ve fetched some data and I need to navigate after the data has been retrieved

What if fetch fails ?

I have a try/catch in the button onClick - will that not work?

Mixing UI with business logic 😬 IMO either you should have some "Result" Sealed class which you can observe in Composables. If you feel keeping these things separate is complicated, you can have your viewmodel return a Flow of "Result" states and you can collect that in composable scope Usually I maintain a sealed class of Loading, Success/Content, Error & Undefined states

Yes, I find that approach to be much more complicated, and I’ve struggled to find a clear example which I can follow where it’s implemented the way you describe. Aside from “mixing UI with business logic” being non-idiomatic in Android dev - it’s very common to do this in React which I’m used to. In this case, my UI is simply forwarding the call the to the VM, so the only business logic is the navigation logic, can you elaborate on what exactly is the issue with doing this?

I'd say there'll be some personal bias but depending upon your use case, let's say you've to manage multiple UI components based on the state of VM call you made, like disabling some buttons in loading state, showing progress bar, adjusting visibility of some component, showing error text and what not will be difficult to manage with simple try-catch. And handling backenf errors at UI side at first seems non-idiomatic for me, just sharing my opinion.

You could still handle errors on the VM side by try/catching, and then re-throwing to prevent navigation in the view. I’m not opposed to implementing an observable navigation event approach, I just couldn’t find any examples of how to do it in compose

Let's say you want to make same fetch call in 5 different Composables, is it better to handle errors at one place or 5 places? Also, you don't need to re-throw exception, you can emit an error state instead, with nice error message (string or string-resource)

I agree, In the rare scenario I’d be making that many of the same fetch-and-navigate calls across different composables, maybe it’s worth investing in a generalised navigation event system. I’d wager that scenario is so rare that it’s probably not worth the added complexity of introducing navigation events (yet)