Path configuration: Difference between replace_root and clear_all?

[ibrahima]

https://native.hotwired.dev/reference/navigation

clear_all and replace_root seem to have the same description, so I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be? I have been trying to get the log in page of my app to reset the navigation stack, and clear_all does a weird thing where it changes the title but doesn't actually replace the existing root page (maybe a bug?), and replace_root does render the login page for me, but I've got a straggling right bar button from a bridge component on the page that was replaced, so this is also not helpful.

[joemasilotti]

Both pop to the root screen on the current navigations tack.

clear_all reloads whatever screen was there. But replace_root takes the new navigation and substitutes that for the first screen on the stack.

[ibrahima]

Ahhh, I now see that it says replace vs refresh in the two descriptions. Thanks!

[ibrahima]

As a side note, the bug I was experiencing was this:

I have a root view with rightBarButtonItems set using a bridge component (something like https://github.com/joemasilotti/bridge-components/blob/main/ios/components/ButtonComponent.swift, but in my case I append to rightBarButtonItems rather than setting rightBarButtonItem because I use it for multiple buttons). I wanted to set up my login screen with a replace_root path configuration, because when the user logs out I wanted to clear the navigation stack. However, for reasons[1], I was using a Stimulus controller with an AJAX request to log out, and then I was using a custom turbo stream action to redirect the user to the login page.

The custom turbo stream action ultimately runs Turbo.visit(url) to "redirect" the user via JS. Apparently, this interacts poorly in such a way that the rightBarButtonItem from the old (logged-in) root view was showing up on the login screen. However, if I use a regular request with a 302 redirect to log out, everything is fine. So there's probably not a bug with the replace_root behavior as far as I can tell, it's just a poor interaction with a custom turbo stream action.

[1] The reason is because I wanted to create a bridge component to do some custom handling on logout, so I couldn't use a regular form post because then the view would disappear before I could run my native logout handler. So... I guess I can either do the equivalent of replace_root there, or I can just go back to a regular form request to destroy the session because the need for the custom logout handling is less now (it was related to navigation tabs, but I've gotten rid of the navigation tabs from my app).