feat: Expose the components making up the ionic react router or expose the internals for fine grained control

[csotiMatyas]

Prerequisites

• I have read the Contributing Guidelines.
• I agree to follow the Code of Conduct.
• I have searched for existing issues that already include this feature request, without success.

Describe the Feature Request

Exposing the components would make, recreating the router with our own specific needs. ( Without just copy pasting out everything from the 2 libraries: ionic/react and ionic/react-router ).

Exposing everything that the router currently provides would also cover, i believe ,most of what we would expect a mobile navigation would be.

Describe the Use Case

A mobile only app, could leverage the memory router instead of the browser router ( i just realized this is even an option, why is this not mentioned anywhere in the docs ), and have the fine grained control that is required to simulate the native navigation ( we all know that the browser router is NOT suitable at all for mobile navigation ). What i would need currently is a way to clear the navigation stack, and clear inbetween pages.
An example flow, a letter represent a page on the DOM / nav stack : A -> B -> C ; A -> B -> D; A -> B -> D -> E ->; A -> B -> D -> F;

After the first replace from C to D, A and B should be cleared from the stack, or at the end of the flow when E is replaced with F then clear the whole thing.
Another flow is just simply logging out, there can be a lot of pages still in the nav stack / on the DOM, that make absolutely no sense, and if you have a flow that uses a replace action but a page is still on the dom after logging out, navigation wil not happen or you can go back to pages and a likes.

Describe Preferred Solution

No response

Describe Alternatives

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Related Code

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Additional Information

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[csotiMatyas]

Expanding on this, adding a "navigation extras" to the push method would also be nice, as there are times when you would need to send even functions from one page to another page, not just search params ( i think the angular router supports / supported this at a point );

Fixing the result of the useIonRouter to the page its used in. You are on page A you go to page B, if you had search params on page A, now you do not have them anymore since useIonRouter will always reflect the current route's state, you change back to page A, you have them again. Page A should not do any work in the background in this regard.

[csotiMatyas]

Expanding on this, if you try to replace to a page that is already on the stack, it does nothing, and you dont have access to internals to ask "hey is this page already in the stack then please 'push' instead", instead the navigation fails silently. Is somebody working on the routing part of the framework, it's the biggest pain point and also the core of the mobile experience.

[ShaneK]

Hey! Thanks for your request. Sorry it took us so long to get back to you. We've been looking through router-based issues now that we're finally nearing the completion of our RR6 migration.

So it looks like this feature request is actually more-or-less 5 requests, let me break them down:

• Navigation extras
• Scoped useIonRouter
• Stack clearing through exposing internal methods
• Stack introspection through exposing internal methods
• Replace-to-existing silent fail fix/documentation
• Memory router documentation

Well, the good news is our RR6 migration will actually take care of the first two. In RR6, navigate takes in an optional state parameter so you can pass in optional data that you can pull off of useLocation().state! Additionally, in RR6, you can useRef(useLocation()) to have what is effectively a scoped useIonRouter.

For stack clearing and introspection, these are issues that RR6 doesn't address. The good news is we actually have some of these methods internally already (findViewItemByPathname, getViewItemsForOutlet) - they're just not wired up to the public useIonRouter hook. We'll look into exposing something like isPathInStack() and getStackLength(), as well as stack management methods like popToRoot() and clearStack() for mobile-first use cases like logout flows.

For the replace-to-existing silent failure, good call on flagging this, thanks! You're right that it's not great DX to have navigation silently fail. We'll investigate whether this should automatically fall back to push or throw a warning, and we'll probably make it better documented.

For IonReactMemoryRouter, it exists and is exported but we don't really highlight it anywhere. We'll add docs for this since it's a better fit for mobile-only apps that don't need browser history.

We'll create a feature card to track this internally. Thanks for the detailed feedback!