Proposal: Fix naming of NavigationView IsBackButtonVisible property

As discussed on Twitter here by @samafshari

Proposal: Rename NavigationView IsBackButtonVisible property to align to its type/conventions

Summary

Currently NavigationView has two properties IsBackEnabled and IsBackButtonVisible. They both have the same documentation string and indicate to the developer that they should be boolean values by using the Is naming guideline.

However, IsBackButtonVisible is an enum instead which can be set to Auto, Visible, or Collapsed.

If the IsBackEnabled there to be able to show the button but have it not be clickable, then that should be made clearer in the docs. This is probably an issue with the doc string on the IsBackButtonVisible property having the same text as IsBackEnabled. Otherwise, if it’s still about just showing if the button is there or not, it should be removed.

I propose that IsBackButtonVisible should be BackButtonVisibility property which is the enum value set. (Or BackVisibility if the IsBackEnabled property does indeed perform a different action and remains or brevity is important.)

Rationale

To summarize, there seems to be a few problems here with API consistency:

• Both properties seem to perform similar functions making understanding what they do when combined difficult or know which to use when
• IsBackButtonVisible indicated it should be a boolean, but is not
• One property is using just Back and the other is using BackButton as the name of the targeted element.

[JaiganeshKumaran]

The documentations should be updated, however the API name can’t be changed without a major release version number. This wont meet our winui3 API change bar, so if it happens it will need to wait for Winui4.

Well, you can add a new property instead of the same type and then tell in docs not to use the old one. Just like how DisplayMode and PaneDisplayMode coexist in NavigationView. Not the best approach but works.

[mdtauk]

Is it time to start populating a backlog list of WinUI 4 projects and issues?

There already is one issue label for that: https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3AIncludeInWinui4 However projects for that might also be helpful.

I was hoping WinUI 3 would be a stable base to build on - but if there are things off limits for change until a v4 or v5 - what is the release frame for those?

I figured 3.0 - 3.9 - 3.22 | so is 4.0 several years away, or does 3.0 only go up to about 3.4 (as in 4 minor updates a year?)