MvvmCross iOS Support and Samples

A while ago Martijn van Dijk and I had a very brief chat about creating an MvvmCross iOS Support library for use with MvvmCross.  Just to add in some general usage bits and bobs to make iOS development with MvvmCross a little bit easier.  I had been creating some useful bits for my own projects and could definitely see the value in them for other people to use in their projects.  But … as ever, my time is stupidly short.

Turns out it’s not as short as I thought and to be honest it didn’t take much effort to pull some things out and wrap them up in a self-contained fashion.  So today I spent a bit of time doing just that.  The results are now available in the MvvmCross iOS Support GitHub repository along with a newly minted MvvmCross iOS Support sample application.

MvvmCross iOS Support

The library really only contains one “helper” element at the moment in the shape of a pretty nifty presenter called – MvxSidePanelsPresenter.  Mvx Presenters are a kind of “glue class” that orchestrates what happens in between a view model navigation request and the presentation of it’s view in the application UI.  So any calls like ShowViewModel<TViewModel>(); will eventually end up being processed by a presenter, which decides what to do with it.

The presenter provides 3 panels as view “targets”, a main central panel, a right panel and a left panel.  Where a view is placed is controlled by a class level attribute.

Panel Presentation

[Register("CenterPanelView")]
[MvxPanelPresentation(MvxPanelEnum.Center, MvxPanelHintType.ActivePanel, true)]
public class CenterPanelView : BaseViewController<CenterPanelViewModel>
{
}

So to explain this example it’s telling the presenter that I want to be displayed in the center panel as the active panel and I also want to be shown immediately.  If this was requesting MvxPanelEnum.Left for instance this would show the view in the left hand panel and would also immediately slide the left panel into view.  Pretty neat.

Combining A UISplitViewController for Master / Detail Views

Another neat feature of the presenter is that it can present views in a split view if the presentation attribute includes the a specific request to do so (by specifying MvxSplitViewBehaviour) and the application is also running on an iPad.  In the case where there are split view behaviours added to the attribute and the application is running in an iPhone these behaviours will be ignored. The views are in that case presented in whichever panel has been specified. So there is a graceful fallback to default behaviour when needed.  You can specify this split view behaviour like this:

[Register("MasterView")]
[MvxPanelPresentation(MvxPanelEnum.Center, MvxPanelHintType.ActivePanel, true, MvxSplitViewBehaviour.Master)]
public class MasterView : BaseViewController<MasterViewModel>
{
}

[Register("DetailView")]
[MvxPanelPresentation(MvxPanelEnum.Center, MvxPanelHintType.ActivePanel, true, MvxSplitViewBehaviour.Detail)]
public class DetailView : BaseViewController<DetailViewModel>
{

The master view with be shown in the left hand portion of the split view and any detail views will be automatically shown in the right hand portion of the same split view.

Let me know if you find this stuff useful and obviously open any pull requests or open issues for any bugs.

You can see the code here on GitHub.  And you can read the more official documentation for this library on the MvvmCross documentation pages here.