Proposal : TVFocusGuideView for Android

Currently, it’s very difficult to direct Focus between Viewgroups of Touchables

ForExample

1. In the below image it’s very difficult to direct focus from any items in cluster 2 to the previously focused item in cluster 1 to achieve this currently we have to set nextFocusUp props for all the children in cluster 2 to cluster 1 last focused item id.

1. In the below example from all the horizontal list items we should open a previously selected menu, which is the second item. For this, we have to set all the first items of lists nextFocusLeft to the 2nd menu item id

Also, one more problem is we have to pass node id between components to achieve this via props which make components reusability an issue

Solution If we have WrapperView like TVFocusFocusGuide which gets focus first for a cluster and then based on requirement we can pass the focus to any of its children’s.

We have android:descendantFocusability and onRequestFocusInDescendants view group props which will let us achieve this behavior.

We can have a component that wraps touchable and controls the focus setup and movement between view groups.

[douglowder]

@TrebuhD that API looks VERY interesting indeed, thank you for letting me know.

[TrebuhD]

API-wise, it would be great to have something like react-spatial-navigation.