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Creating a Xamarin.iOS application using the Elements API

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This article builds upon the information presented in the Introduction to MonoTouch Dialog article. It presents a walkthrough that shows how to use the MonoTouch.Dialog (MT.D) Elements API to quickly get started building an application with MT.D.

In this walkthrough, we’ll use the MT.D Elements API to create a master-detail style of application that displays a task list. When the user selects the + button in the navigation bar, a new row will be added to the table for the task. Selecting the row will navigate to the detail screen that allows us to update the task description and the due date, as illustrated below:

Selecting the row will navigate to the detail screen that allows us to update the task description and the due date

Setting up MT.D

MT.D is distributed with Xamarin.iOS. To use it, right-click on the References node of a Xamarin.iOS project in Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio for Mac and add a reference to the MonoTouch.Dialog-1 assembly. Then, add using MonoTouch.Dialog statements in your source code as necessary.

Elements API walkthrough

In the Introduction to MonoTouch Dialog article, we gained a solid understanding of the different parts of MT.D. Let’s use the Elements API to put them all together into an application.

Setting up the multi-screen application

To start the screen creation process, MonoTouch.Dialog creates a DialogViewController, and then adds a RootElement.

To create a multi-screen application with MonoTouch.Dialog, we need to:

  1. Create a UINavigationController.
  2. Create a DialogViewController.
  3. Add the DialogViewController as the root of the UINavigationController.
  4. Add a RootElement to the DialogViewController.
  5. Add Sections and Elements to the RootElement.

Using A UINavigationController

To create a navigation-style application, we need to create a UINavigationController, and then add it as the RootViewController in the FinishedLaunching method of the AppDelegate. To make the UINavigationController work with MonoTouch.Dialog, we add a DialogViewController to the UINavigationController as shown below:

public override bool FinishedLaunching (UIApplication app, NSDictionary options)
{
    _window = new UIWindow (UIScreen.MainScreen.Bounds);
            
    _rootElement = new RootElement ("To Do List"){new Section ()};

    // code to create screens with MT.D will go here …

    _rootVC = new DialogViewController (_rootElement);
    _nav = new UINavigationController (_rootVC);
    _window.RootViewController = _nav;
    _window.MakeKeyAndVisible ();
            
    return true;
}

The code above creates an instance of a RootElement and passes it into the DialogViewController. The DialogViewController always has a RootElement at the top of its hierarchy. In this example, the RootElement is created with the string “To Do List,” which serves as the title in the navigation controller’s navigation bar. At this point, running the application would present the screen shown below:

Running the application will present the screen shown here

Let’s see how to use MonoTouch.Dialog’s hierarchical structure of Sections and Elements to add more screens.

Creating the Dialog screens

A DialogViewController is a UITableViewController subclass that MonoTouch.Dialog uses to add screens. MonoTouch.Dialog creates screens by adding a RootElement to a DialogViewController, as we saw above. The RootElement can have Section instances that represent the sections of a table. The sections are made up of elements, other sections, or even other RootElements. By nesting RootElements, MonoTouch.Dialog automatically creates a navigation-style application, as we’ll see next.

Using DialogViewController

The DialogViewController, being a UITableViewController subclass, has a UITableView as its view. In this example, we want to add items to the table each time the + button is tapped. Since the DialogViewController was added to a UINavigationController, we can use the NavigationItem’s RightBarButton property to add the + button, as shown below:

_addButton = new UIBarButtonItem (UIBarButtonSystemItem.Add);
_rootVC.NavigationItem.RightBarButtonItem = _addButton;

When we created the RootElement earlier, we passed it a single Section instance so that we could add elements as the + button is tapped by the user. We can use the following code to accomplish this in the event handler for the button:

_addButton.Clicked += (sender, e) => {                
    ++n;
                
    var task = new Task{Name = "task " + n, DueDate = DateTime.Now};
                
    var taskElement = new RootElement (task.Name) {
        new Section () {
            new EntryElement (task.Name, "Enter task description", task.Description)
        },
        new Section () {
            new DateElement ("Due Date", task.DueDate)
        }
    };
    _rootElement [0].Add (taskElement);
};

This code creates a new Task object each time the button is tapped. The following shows the simple implementation of the Task class:

public class Task
{   
    public Task ()
    {
    }
      
    public string Name { get; set; }
        
    public string Description { get; set; }

    public DateTime DueDate { get; set; }
}

The task’s Name property is used to create the RootElement’s caption along with a counter variable named n that is incremented for each new task. MonoTouch.Dialog turns the elements into the rows that are added to the TableView when each taskElement is added.

Presenting and managing Dialog Screens

We used a RootElement so that MonoTouch.Dialog would automatically create a new screen for each task’s details and navigate to it when a row is selected.

The task detail screen itself is composed of two sections; each of these sections contains a single element. The first element is created from an EntryElement to provide an editable row for the task’s Description property. When the element is selected, a keyboard for text editing is presented as shown below:

When the element is selected, a keyboard for text editing is presented as shown

The second section contains a DateElement that lets us manage the task’s DueDate property. Selecting the date automatically loads a date picker as shown:

Selecting the date automatically loads a date picker as

In both the EntryElement and DateElement cases (or for any data-entry element in MonoTouch.Dialog), any changes to the values are preserved automatically. We can demonstrate this by editing the date and then navigating back and forth between the root screen and various task details, where the values in the detail screens are preserved.

Summary

This article presented a walkthrough that showed how to use the MonoTouch.Dialog Elements API. It covered the basic steps to create a multi-screen application with MT.D, including how to use a DialogViewController and how to add Elements and Sections to create screens. In addition, it showed how to use MT.D in conjunction with a UINavigationController.