Navigation Drawer: how make fragments persistent (keep alive) while switching (not rotating) - android-fragments

Question

With Fragment:setRetainInstance(true); the fragment is not re-instantiated on a phones orientation change.
And of course i want my fragments to be kept alive while switching from one fragment to another.
But the Android Studio 4 provides a wizard-template with only
DrawerLayout drawer = findViewById(R.id.drawer_layout);
NavigationView navigationView = findViewById(R.id.nav_view);
// Passing each menu ID as a set of Ids because each
// menu should be considered as top level destinations.
mAppBarConfiguration = new AppBarConfiguration.Builder(
R.id.nav_home, R.id.nav_gallery, R.id.nav_slideshow)
.setDrawerLayout(drawer)
.build();
NavController navController = Navigation.findNavController(this, R.id.nav_host_fragment);
NavigationUI.setupActionBarWithNavController(this, navController, mAppBarConfiguration);
NavigationUI.setupWithNavController(navigationView, navController);
From hours of debugging and searching the net if think it would need to inherent from the class FragmentNavigator so i can overwrite FragmentNavigator:naviagte where a new fragment gets created via final Fragment frag = instantiateFragment(.. and then is added with ft.replace(mContainerId, frag);
So i could find my old fragment and use ftNew.show and ftOld.hide instead.
Of course this is a stupid idea, because this navigate method is full of other internal stuff.
And i have no idea where that FrameNavigator is created.
I can retrieve it in the MainActivity:OnCreate with
NavigatorProvider navProvider = navController.getNavigatorProvider ();
Navigator<NavDestination> navigator = navProvider.getNavigator("fragment");
But at that time i could only replace it with my derived version. And there is no replaceNavigtor method but only a addNavigator method, which is called where ?
And anyways this all will be far to complicated and therefore error prone.
Why is there no simple option to keep my fragments alive :-(
In older Wizard-Templates there was the possibility of
#Override
public void onNavigationDrawerItemSelected(int position) {
Fragment fragment;
switch (position) {
case 1:
fragment = fragment1;
break;
case 2:
fragment = fragment2;
break;
case 3:
fragment = fragment3;
break;
}
FragmentTransaction ft = getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction();
if(mCurrentFragment == null) {
ft.add(R.id.container, fragment).commit();
mCurrentFragment = fragment;
} else if(fragment.isAdded()) {
ft.hide(mCurrentFragment).show(fragment).commit();
} else {
ft.hide(mCurrentFragment).add(R.id.container, fragment).commit();
}
mCurrentFragment = fragment;
}
but i have no idea how to do this with the Android 4.0 template where my MainActivity is only derived as:
public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {
private AppBarConfiguration mAppBarConfiguration;
Ideas welcome :'(

Answer 1

Hi there & sorry for my late answer! I had a similar problem with navigation drawers and navigation component. I tried around a little and found a working solution, which might be helpful for others too.
The key is the usage of a custom FragmentFactory in the FragmentManager of the MainActivity. See the code for this below:
public class StaticFragmentFactory extends FragmentFactory {
private myNavHostFragment1 tripNavHostFragment;
private myNavHostFragment2 settingsNavHostFragment;
#NonNull
#Override
public Fragment instantiate(#NonNull ClassLoader classLoader, #NonNull String className) {
if (MyNavHostFragment1.class.getName().equals(className)) {
if (this.myNavHostFragment1 == null) {
this.myNavHostFragment1 = new MyNavHostFragment1();
}
return this.myNavHostFragment1 ;
} else if (MyNavHostFragment2.class.getName().equals(className)) {
if (this.myNavHostFragment2 == null) {
this.myNavHostFragment2 = new MyNavHostFragment2();
}
return this.myNavHostFragment2;
}
return super.instantiate(classLoader, className);
}
}
The FragmentFactory survives the navigation between different fragments using the NavigationComponent of AndroidX. To keep the fragments alive, the FragmentFactory stores an instance of the fragments which should survive and returns this instance if this is not null. You can find a similar pattern when using a singleton pattern in classes.
You have to register the FragmentFactory in the corresponding activity by calling
this.getSupportFragmentManager().setFragmentFactory(new StaticFragmentFactory())
Please note also that I'm using nesten fragments here, so one toplevel fragment (called NavHostFragmen here) contains multiple child fragments. All fragments are using the same FragmentFactory of their parent fragments. The custom FragmentFactory above returns the result of the super class method, when the fragment to be instantiated is not known to keep alive.