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)

Creating an API Data Service


Using BaseHttpService as a foundation that abstracts away the HTTP request details, we can now begin to create services that leverage it to get responses back from the API in the form of domain-specific models. Specifically, we will create a data service that can be used by the ViewModels to get the TripLogEntry objects from the backend service.

We will start off by defining an interface for the data service that can be injected into the ViewModels, ensuring there is no strict dependency on the API or the logic that communicates with it, continuing the pattern we put in place in Chapter 4, Platform Specific Services and Dependency Injection.

  1. Create a new interface named ITripLogDataService in the Services folder in the core library:

    public interface ITripLogDataService
    { }
  2. Update the ITripLogDataService interface with methods to get, update, and delete TripLogEntry objects:

    public interface ITripLogDataService
    {
        Task<IList<TripLogEntry>> GetEntriesAsync...