Portal Communication

Ionic Portals provides multiple ways to communicate between the web and native parts of your application.

PortalsPlugin

The Ionic Portals library comes packaged with a plugin called the PortalsPlugin that provides a way to communicate between the web and native parts of your application in a publish-subscribe fashion. This method provides a way to pass data or control elements of the native UI without needing to write a custom Capacitor plugin.

See our guide on How To Use The PortalsPlugin.

Capacitor Core Plugins

Ionic Portals uses Capacitor as the bridge between your web and native application. One of the main benefits of this is that you can use Capacitor Plugins in applications using Portals. All of the Core Capacitor Plugins are available out of the box via NPM for the web application and as native dependencies from Maven Central and Cocoapods.

See our guide on How To Use a Capacitor Plugin.

Custom Plugins

Using the Capacitor Plugin system you can develop a custom interface for the communication through Portals inside your native application and provide your web application a Typescript interface to use that plugin as you would any Capacitor Plugin.

See our guide on How To Define a Portal API.

Which Should I Choose?

See our page on Communication Mechanisms to explore the different Portal Communication options in more detail and see which might best fit your use case.