Enterprise Application Patterns using Xamarin.Forms eBook
Architectural guidance for developing adaptable, maintainable, and testable Xamarin.Forms enterprise applications
Note
This eBook was published in the spring of 2017, and has not been updated since then. There is much in the book that remains valuable, but some of the material is outdated.
This eBook provides guidance on how to implement the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, dependency injection, navigation, validation, and configuration management, while maintaining loose coupling. In addition, there's also guidance on performing authentication and authorization with IdentityServer, accessing data from containerized microservices, and unit testing.
Preface
This chapter explains the purpose and scope of the guide, and who it's aimed at.
Introduction
Developers of enterprise apps face several challenges that can alter the architecture of the app during development. Therefore, it's important to build an app so that it can be modified or extended over time. Designing for such adaptability can be difficult, but typically involves partitioning an app into discrete, loosely coupled components that can be easily integrated together into an app.
MVVM
The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern helps to cleanly separate the business and presentation logic of an application from its user interface (UI). Maintaining a clean separation between application logic and the UI helps to address numerous development issues and can make an application easier to test, maintain, and evolve. It can also greatly improve code re-use opportunities and allows developers and UI designers to more easily collaborate when developing their respective parts of an app.
Dependency Injection
Dependency injection enables decoupling of concrete types from the code that depends on these types. It typically uses a container that holds a list of registrations and mappings between interfaces and abstract types, and the concrete types that implement or extend these types.
Dependency injection containers reduce the coupling between objects by providing a facility to instantiate class instances and manage their lifetime based on the configuration of the container. During the objects creation, the container injects any dependencies that the object requires into it. If those dependencies have not yet been created, the container creates and resolves their dependencies first.
Communicating Between Loosely Coupled Components
The Xamarin.Forms MessagingCenter class implements the publish-subscribe pattern, allowing message-based communication between components that are inconvenient to link by object and type references. This mechanism allows publishers and subscribers to communicate without having a reference to each other, helping to reduce dependencies between components, while also allowing components to be independently developed and tested.
Navigation
Xamarin.Forms includes support for page navigation, which typically results from the user's interaction with the UI, or from the app itself, as a result of internal logic-driven state changes. However, navigation can be complex to implement in apps that use the MVVM pattern.
This chapter presents a NavigationService class, which is used to perform view model-first navigation from view models. Placing navigation logic in view model classes means that the logic can be exercised through automated tests. In addition, the view model can then implement logic to control navigation to ensure that certain business rules are enforced.
Validation
Any app that accepts input from users should ensure that the input is valid. Without validation, a user can supply data that causes the app to fail. Validation enforces business rules, and prevents an attacker from injecting malicious data.
In the context of the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, a view model or model will often be required to perform data validation and signal any validation errors to the view so that the user can correct them.
Configuration Management
Settings allow the separation of data that configures the behavior of an app from the code, allowing the behavior to be changed without rebuilding the app. App settings are data that an app creates and manages, and user settings are the customizable settings of an app that affect the behavior of the app and don't require frequent re-adjustment.
Containerized Microservices
Microservices offer an approach to application development and deployment that's suited to the agility, scale, and reliability requirements of modern cloud applications. One of the main advantages of microservices is that they can be scaled-out independently, which means that a specific functional area can be scaled that requires more processing power or network bandwidth to support demand, without unnecessarily scaling areas of the application that are not experiencing increased demand.
Authentication and Authorization
There are many approaches to integrating authentication and authorization into a Xamarin.Forms app that communicates with an ASP.NET MVC web application. Here, authentication and authorization are performed with a containerized identity microservice that uses IdentityServer 4. IdentityServer is an open source OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 framework for ASP.NET Core that integrates with ASP.NET Core Identity to perform bearer token authentication.
Accessing Remote Data
Many modern web-based solutions make use of web services, hosted by web servers, to provide functionality for remote client applications. The operations that a web service exposes constitute a web API, and client apps should be able to utilize the web API without knowing how the data or operations that the API exposes are implemented.
Unit Testing
Testing models and view models from MVVM applications is identical to testing any other classes, and the same tools and techniques can be used. However, there are some patterns that are typical to model and view model classes, that can benefit from specific unit testing techniques.
Community Site
This project has a community site, on which you can post questions, and provide feedback. The community site is located on GitHub. Alternatively, feedback about the eBook can be emailed to dotnet-architecture-ebooks-feedback@service.microsoft.com.