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)

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 that 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. To create a data service for the TripLog API, perform the following steps:

  1. Create a new interface named ITripLogDataService in the Services folder of the core library:
    public interface ITripLogDataService
    {
    }
    
  2. Update the ITripLogDataService interface with methods to get and add new TripLogEntry objects...