Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms

By : Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms

By: Ed Snider

Overview of this book

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we’ll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We’ll start by introducing a core separation between the app’s user interface and the app’s business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding. Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we’ll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We’ll start by introducing a core separation between the app’s user interface and the app’s business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding. Then we will focus on building out a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation, geo-location, and the camera, as well as how to use these services with inversion of control and dependency injection. Next we’ll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization. Then, we’ll dive into testing the app—both the app logic through unit tests and the user interface using Xamarin’s UITest framework. Finally, we’ll integrate Xamarin Insights for monitoring usage and bugs to gain a proactive edge on app quality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Chapter 6. API Data Access

So far in this book, we have worked with static data that is hard-coded directly into the TripLog app itself. However, in the real world, it is rare that an app depends purely on local static data—most mobile apps get their data from a remote data source, typically an API. In some cases, an app may talk to a third party API, for example, that of a social network. Alternatively, developers sometimes create their own API to make data available for their apps. In this chapter, we will create a simple API in the cloud that we can connect to and retrieve data from in the TripLog app.

Here is a quick look at what we will cover in this chapter:

  • Creating a live, cloud based backend service and API using Microsoft's Azure App Services platform to store and retrieve TripLog data

  • Creating a data access service that handles communication with the API for the TripLog mobile app

  • Setting up data caching so the TripLog can work offline