Cross Platform App Video (Droid)

I've been hard at work porting our iOS application over to other platforms. I recently posted a video showing the application running on the Mac, well I've done the same for Android. MvvmCross and Xamarin are proving to be a very powerful combination. I believe I'm sharing about 80% of the code across these 3 platforms. More importantly the code that is shared is the tricky stuff (networking IO, protocols, database etc). I'll be digging deeper into the architecture in future posts. Stay tuned.

DeapExtensions Abbreviated NameSpace

Stuart Lodge just pointed out that I could use an abbreviated namespace so that the full DeapExtenions name does not have to be typed out in your Views. @cheesebaron has a blog post thats explains how to use it http://blog.ostebaronen.dk/2012/12/adding-view-namespace-abbreviations-in.html

I've updated the DeapExtensions to take advantage of this shortcut. Now you can just declare the BindableGroupListView as DeapExt.BindableGroupListView

There, much neater :) Don't forget to the use the DeapExtensions.Binding.Droid.BaseAndroidBindingSetup as your base for your setup class. It simply registers the DeapExt with MvvmCross.

MvvmCross.DeapExtensions

Stuart Lodge suggested I start a separate library of extensions for the excellent MvvmCross framework. Meet MvvmCross.DeapExtensions.  The first addition is a grouped list view. Those familiar with the UITableView Section in UITableView on iOS will know exactly what I'm talking about. Its essentially a list with group headers separating items that belong together.

My model consists of profiles and each profile has a list of devices that belongs to it. Binding the BindableGroupListView to the list of profiles automatically gives us the result we after.

Here is my Activity with the the grouped list declared


The important part is the MvxBind which binds the ListView to the SearchedProfiles property in my ViewModel.


The Item and Group Template are regular Android Layouts containing TextViews. These TextViews are bound using MvvmCross directly to there respective model objects. So list item_profile was bound to the ProfileName property on Profile and listitem_device which has 2 TextViews was bound to Device and its corresponding propertys.

BindableGroupListView works by assuming the list of items you bind to it are groups and that these groups which are are enumerable contain the items you wish to see in the group.


Lastly, notice how I also declare the ItemClick to DeviceSelected in the bind command. DeviceSelected is an ICommand declared in the ViewModel. DeviceSelected gets the Device selected and navigates to another Activity. Right now clicks are ignored on the groups. I've added GroupClick to support click handling on the group items.