Why does my SwiftUI app crash when navigating backwards after placing a `NavigationLink` inside of a `navigationBarItems` in a `NavigationView`?

This was quite a pain point for me! I left it until most of my app was completed and I had the mind space to deal with the crashing.

I think we can all agree that there's some pretty awesome stuff with SwifUI but that the debugging can be difficult.

In my opinion, I would say that this is a BUG. Here is my rationale:

• If you wrap the presentationMode dismiss call in an asynchronous delay of about a half-second, you should find that the program will no longer crash.

  DispatchQueue.main.asyncAfter(deadline: .now() + 0.5) {
      self.presentationMode.wrappedValue.dismiss()
  } 
  

• This suggests to me that the bug is an unexpected behaviour way down deep in how SwiftUI interfaces with all the other UIKit code to manage the various views. Depending on your actual code, you might find that if there is some minor complexity in the view, the crash actually will not happen. For example, if you are dismissing from a view to one that has a list, and that list is empty, you will get a crash without the asynchronous delay. On the other hand, if you have even just one entry in that list view, forcing a loop iteration to generate the parent view, you'll see that the crash will not occur.

I'm not so sure how robust my solution of wrapping the dismiss call in a delay is. I have to test it much more. If you have ideas on this, please let me know! I'd be very happy to learn from you!

This also has frustrated me for quite some time. Over the past few months, depending on the Xcode version, simulator version and real device type and/or version, it has gone from working to failing to working again, seemingly at random. However, recently it has been failing consistently for me, so yesterday I took a deep dive into it. I am currently using Xcode Version 11.2.1 (11B500).

It looks like the issue revolves around the Nav Bar and the way the buttons were added to it. So instead of using a NavigationLink() for the button itself, I tried using a standard Button() with an action that sets a @State var that activates a hidden NavigationLink. Here is a replacement for Robert's Parent View:

struct Parent: View {
    @State private var showingChildView = false
    var body: some View {
        NavigationView {
            VStack {
                Text("Hello World")
                NavigationLink(destination: Child(),
                               isActive: self.$showingChildView)
                { EmptyView() }
                    .frame(width: 0, height: 0)
                    .disabled(true)
                    .hidden()            
             }
             .navigationBarItems(
                 trailing: Button(action:{ self.showingChildView = true }) { Text("Next") }
             )
        }
    }
}

For me, this works very consistently across all simulators and all real devices.

Here are my helper views:

struct HiddenNavigationLink<Destination : View>: View {

    public var destination:  Destination
    public var isActive: Binding<Bool>

    var body: some View {

        NavigationLink(destination: self.destination, isActive: self.isActive)
        { EmptyView() }
            .frame(width: 0, height: 0)
            .disabled(true)
            .hidden()
    }
}

struct ActivateButton<Label> : View where Label : View {

    public var activates: Binding<Bool>
    public var label: Label

    public init(activates: Binding<Bool>, @ViewBuilder label: () -> Label) {
        self.activates = activates
        self.label = label()
    }

    var body: some View {
        Button(action: { self.activates.wrappedValue = true }, label: { self.label } )
    }
}

Here is an example of the usage:

struct ContentView: View {
    @State private var showingAddView: Bool = false
    var body: some View {
        NavigationView {
            VStack {
                Text("Hello, World!")
                HiddenNavigationLink(destination: AddView(), isActive: self.$showingAddView)
            }
            .navigationBarItems(trailing:
                HStack {
                    ActivateButton(activates: self.$showingAddView) { Image(uiImage: UIImage(systemName: "plus")!) }
                    EditButton()
            } )
        }
    }
}

This is a major bug and I can't see a proper way to work around it. Worked fine in iOS 13/13.1 but 13.2 crashes.

You can actually replicate it in a much simpler way (this code is literally all you need).

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        NavigationView {
            Text("Hello, World!").navigationBarTitle("To Do App")
                .navigationBarItems(leading: NavigationLink(destination: Text("Hi")) {
                    Text("Nav")
                    }
            )
        }
    }
}

Hope Apple sort it out as it will surely break loads of SwiftUI apps (including mine).