Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Third Edition

By : Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Third Edition

By: Ed Snider

Overview of this book

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the most recent version of Xamarin.Forms to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. This new edition features Xamarin.Forms 4 updates, including CollectionView and RefreshView, new coverage of client-side validation, and updates on how to implement user authentication. Mastering Xamarin.Forms, Third Edition is one of the few Xamarin books structured around the development of a simple app from start to finish, beginning with a basic Xamarin.Forms app and going step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. This book introduces a core separation between the app's user interface and the app's business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding, and then focuses on building a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation and geo-location, as well as how to loosely use these services in the app with inversion of control and dependency injection. You’ll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization before testing the app logic through unit testing. Finally, you will learn how to add monitoring to your Xamarin.Forms projects to track crashes and analytics and gain a proactive edge on quality.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Adding pull-to-refresh

As with the new entry page, when the main page is loading our data, we should present the user with a loading indicator so that they know their list of entries is on its way. However, since the main page is using a data-bound CollectionView instead of a static TableView, we can surround the CollectionView with a RefreshView to easily add pull-to-refresh functionality.

Pull-to-refresh also has the benefit of allowing users to easily refresh the screen and load any new data that might be available. Xamarin.Forms makes adding pull-to-refresh very easy, and we will still use the IsBusy property from our BaseViewModel, just as we did on the new entry page.

The Xamarin.Forms RefreshView API requires two things: an ICommand that handles refreshing the bound source of the scrollable element it surrounds (in our case, this is a CollectionView), and a boolean field that indicates whether the RefreshView is currently refreshing or not. To add pull-to-refresh, perform...