I am playing around with Xamarin.Forms (mvvm) with Prism and have noticed that some tutorials show navigating to another Page while others show navigating to a View.
At a high level, I understand the literal difference... however I do not understand when I should use one over the other? I have an inclination that some of the reasoning is around dependencies, for example:
A Page has the instance of User > navigate to a view = User is still present when the back operation is used... meanwhile if you want this same behavior in navigating to and from a page, you'll need to pass the instance around via parameters... Is this correct/the reasoning behind navigating to and from views instead of pages?
In X.Forms View's are only visual objects, they do not support any navigation or any kind of infrastructure. They can only be showed when you navigate to a Page that hosts them, it doest not make sense the phrasing navigate to a View. So you should only use Page's.. In your example project they also only navigate to Page's. In the one you say they are navigating to "Views" it is only in the name, because ViewA is a ContentPage
Technically, in pure MVVM, the ViewModel should know completely nothing about the View and vice versa. When you use Page First Navigation approach you violate the first sentence. Here is an example:
class MyViewModel
{
}
class MyView
{
public MyView()
{
InitializeComponent();
// Alternatively you can do the same thing in XAML
this.BindingContext = new MyViewModel();
}
}
As you see the View is aware of the ViewModel.
When you use a ViewModel First Navigation approach, the decision of which
View should have witch ViewModel is delegated to a dedicated class. This class then is used in a custom NavigationService to match a ViewModel to a View. So it will be possible to navigate from a ViewModel to a ViewModel. This way both ViewModel and the View know nothing about each other. The disadvantage of this approach is complexity.
This is a very short answer, however, I hope you will get the key point. There are many examples of both approaches:
ViewModel First Navigation
Page First Navigation
P.S.: Prism has very nice mechanism that handle navigation. What I wrote above and the examples that I provided are just for low level understanding of this approach. If you want to use Prism you definitely have to be familiar with it.
Related
Hy everybody
I am a newbie ios programmer and I'm facing many doubts when I must switch the pages of my app.
With the term "page" I mean a UIView that fills the whole screen with some widgets (buttons, textboxes. tables..)
As far as I have understood what I've read I should use an UIViewController to manage each of these pages
since each page should be a screen’s worth of content.
My App starts with a ViewScroller with many buttons and when the user clicks one of these it opens a new page.
The first page is the UIView connected to the RootController Of the Window.
So far to open the new pages I add a child controller to the RootController and it's view as a child of the view of the RootController:
RicLocaliController = [[RicercaLocaliViewController alloc] initWithNibName:#"RicercaLocaliViewController" bundle:nil];
[self addChildViewController:RicLocaliController];
[RicLocaliController didMoveToParentViewController:self];
[self.view addSubview:RicLocaliController.view];
RicLocaliController.view.frame = self.view.bounds;
When the user clicks the "Back" Button I remove the child controller and the child view.
Going down this road I would get a dynamic tree of Controllers with their Views.
So far I have not encountered problems and my app can go up to a third level in the tree and come back. Each page behaves correctly when orientation changes.
But I'm afraid that adding, for each subpage, a child controller and a child view could be not the right thing to do.
I'm afraid that if I nest a lot of pages when the orientation changes the app could respond slowly since also the superviews will do something to manage this event.
So what I wonder is if what I am doing is completely senseless, if I should use Navigation controllers or some other way to manage my page changes.
Unfortunately my boss is not giving me enough time to study well the subject and so I would like an advice to follow the best solution possibly using the most standard and less complex component offered by the framework instead of the newest features.
I read a lot of web pages on the subject but it seems to me that there are many ways to manage the navigation beetwen pages and this makes me confused.
I apologize for my bad english but i'm tired and English it's not my first language.
You HAVE to do some studying. You will spend more time clearing up all your problems later otherwise... but, here are some tips.
Using nested ViewControllers leads to all kinds of trouble so if you are short of time, skip that.
Think of each "Page" as one ViewController. A ViewController has a property called View but that is actually just the top view of a whole hierarchy of views. A view is the base class for any visual object, like labels, buttons etc. All views can have subviews, so you can add an image under a label etc. and do really wierd stuff if you want to. I am just saying this to free your mind about how you can use views.
Now, ViewControllers are supposed to hold to code to ONE view hierarchy. That view hierarchy is for that View Controller only.
When the user wants to navigate to another page, you have a few alternatives:
NavigationViewController - that should be used when the user wants to delve down into data, like opening a detailed view of an item in a list etc. The NavigationViewController gives you help with back buttons, proper animation etc. You "pop" a viewcontroller to go back one level. If the user click the back-button, this is automatic.
TabBarViewController - use that if you want a tab bar at the bottom of the screen. Each tab is connected to a ViewController, that has it's own view hierarchy.
PushModal - If you are in a ViewController and just needs to get some data from the user, which is not part of the normal navigation of the app, you can push a new ViewController modally. This is the way you interact with iOS built in ViewControllers. This is also a good way to get a value back from the view controller.
There you have it. Go learn more. :)
It sounds like, for what you are using, you should be using a navigation controller. This will automatically handle pushing views onto the stack and then popping them off again later. This will also automatically create a back button (it is customizable) in the navigation bar.
If you are using iOS 5 or 6, I highly recommend trying out "storyboards" in Interface Builder. Storyboards allow you to graphically represent transitions (called "segues") between different views.
On top of being easier to design and implement, another advantage is that, if in the future you want to change the design of your application, you don't have to trawl through all your code and manually update each view connection.
Im starting with iPhone programming and objective c, i got some books and some tutorials to start with but i got one doubt and i cant find the answer for it.
I love mvc, so i have the view, the controller that interact with view and the model.
But, do i have a main controller that interact with other controller?
for example, i have personaController, personView and person class as part of model.
I have other mode class like familly, with a famillyView and do i need famillyController class ? should i put all in one main controller class?
if i should have more than one controller (one for each model class), how they interact? For example, i show famillyview, and want to show data from one person, so need personController right? should i got to one main controller and from that one to personController?
a pic to show my point of view. enter link description here
I hope its get clear my doubt. If someone know some rly good book or tutorial i appreciate it. Thx in advance!
i used this example
to interact with controllers.
iOS programming uses Model/View/ViewController perception.
Models -> the classes that contains the guts and data of your application, like you mentioned. Person/Family and those sort of classes.
Views -> all the UI forms in iOS inherit from this class. a View is not a screen, it's an object that is contained in a screen.
ViewControllers -> you can refer ViewControllers to screens, each of them contain one main rootview that can contain multiple views, and those view can contain more subview and so on.
I'm using WPF and trying to program the MVVM way.
I understand how every view has its own view model and this works quite well. I am struggling to manage the interaction between views though.
Say I have two views, View1 and View2, each with its own ViewModel, ViewModel1 and ViewModel2. If I have a combobox on View1 and a button, what is the correct way to close the first view, notify the second view of the selection and show the second view once the button is pressed? It doesn't seem like it should go in the model because it's a UI thing. The ViewModel shouldn't know how to open and close WPF forms (or should it?) And the views shouldn't know about any other ViewModels (or should they?)
So how are these problems solved? In a nutshell:
1) How is data passed between views?
2) What manages the lifetime/visibility of views?
It will depend on whether you are doing view model or view first, and the exact implementation details will depend on if you are using an MVVM framework. If you aren't using a framework, then I would strongly recommend you start using one.
In your example, when the button is pressed, a method on ViewModel1 will be invoked. If doing view model first (which I would recommend), you would instantiate an instance of ViewModel2, and at this point you could pass in the combobox selection to the constructor of ViewModel2.
Depending on your framework, there will be different ways of then displaying the view associated with ViewModel2.
For 1) you can sychronize data through the DataModel. Provided each view shares the same instance of the DataModel and it implements INotifyPropertyChanged multiple views can be updated simulateneously.
Your sesond question is a matter of design, as #devdigital states it can depend on whether it is View first or ViewModel first. I would consider the introduction of a Controller class in much as the same way ASP.Net MVC works which controls which view is displayed. You can expose a ViewClosed event on the ViewModel which the controller can listen to and based on your workflow open another view.
You might consider introducing Controllers which are responsible for the lifetime management of the ViewModels. Furthermore, they mediate between the ViewModels.
The sample applications of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) show how these Controllers can be implemented.
I am trying to wrap my head around controllers in Cocoa Touch. The main problem is that I would like to have more than one controller “on screen” at once – I want to have a large view (with controller A) composed of smaller views controlled by their own controllers (say B). I’d like to have it this way because the division makes the code much cleaner. What’s bad is that the additional controllers (of type B) are not “first-class citizens” on the screen, for example they do not receive the autorotation queries and notifications. (And cannot easily display modal controllers, they have to send the presentModal… message to their parent controller.)
What is the difference between the A and B controllers from Cocoa viewpoint? Does the system keep some kind of pointer to the “frontmost controller”, a privileged one to which it sends notifications and such stuff? Why don’t the other controllers receive them, even though their views are on the screen? Is having multiple controllers “on screen” considered a hack? Or is it supported and I am just missing some point? Thank you.
More about the problem I am trying to solve: I am writing a simple photo browser. Photos are displayed in full screen, user can swipe left or right to change photos. The A controller takes care of the scrolling part and the B controllers take care of each photo itself.
Isolating B seemed like a good idea, since the photos are loaded from network and there is a lot that can happen, like the network might be down et cetera. In the B controller the code is fairly simple, since B only works with one particular photo. If I moved the code to the A controller, things would get messy.
The only thing I don’t like about the current solution is that I have to manually work around B not being a “first-class” controller. I have to pass some calls manually through A to B and when B wants to display a modal dialog, it has to send the presentModal… to A. Which is ugly.
There is now a first-class support for this scenario since iOS 5, it’s called controller containment.
swift controller containment
objc controller containment.
It's not closely related to the original question but important. Apple clearly states in View Controller Programming Guide that a view controller is responsible for controlling exactly one screen's content:
"Each custom view controller object you create is responsible for managing exactly one screen’s worth of content. The one-to-one correspondence between a view controller and a screen is a very important consideration in the design of your application. You should not use multiple custom view controllers to manage different portions of the same screen. Similarly, you should not use a single custom view controller object to manage multiple screens worth of content.
Note: If you want to divide a single screen into multiple areas and manage each one separately, use generic controller objects (custom objects descending from NSObject) instead of view controller objects to manage each subsection of the screen. Then use a single view controller object to manage the generic controller objects. The view controller coordinates the overall screen interactions but forwards messages as needed to the generic controller objects it manages."
However in iPad Programming Guide they also say that there may be container view controllers:
"A view controller is responsible for a single view. Most of the time, a view controller’s view is expected to fill the entire span of the application window. In some cases, though, a view controller may be embedded inside another view controller (known as a container view controller) and presented along with other content. Navigation and tab bar controllers are examples of container view controllers."
Up to my current knowledge I would not use sub-view controllers in a view controller but try to subclass NSObject and send messages to them from my main view controller.
Also check this thread:
MGSplitViewController discussion
First, and this is important, view controllers don't get "on screen" -- views do. Your "top level" controller can certainly pass along the kinds of messages you're describing to its "sub-view-controllers". In fact, this is how most apps work. Consider an app that has a tab bar, and where the views use navigation controllers. You actually have several view controllers "running" at the same time, each with its own view on screen at once -- your "root" view controller will be an instance (or subclass) of UITabBarController, which then has several nested UINavigationControllers, each which will display nested view controllers (like an instance or a subclass of UITableViewController).
You might want to read up a bit on how responder chains work. Consider a touch event. It will be generated for the view closest to the top of the stack, that can receive events, which is also underneath the tap. If that view can't handle it, it gets passed up the view hierarchy food chain until something deals with it (and then eats it).
As to the specifics of your question, on the whole, I'm not sure exactly what the strategy you describe is really doing to benefit you in terms of complexity. It depends on how exactly you're implementing things, but having separate view controllers for each little subview may require more bookkeeping code than just having one view controller that knows about all its sub-view components.
This is a pretty old question, but since I guess there are people who might face the same problem today I'd like to share my solution.
I was writing this application that had this one screen with a lot of information, pagination, controls etc. Since according to Apple's MVC documentation on the role of ViewControllers, you should not implement the logic in view itself, or access the data model directly from it, I had to choose between having a Massive ViewController with a few thousand lines of code which was both hard to maintain and debug(even with unit tests) or find a new way.
My solution was to use UIContainerView like below:
this way, you can implement each part's logic in it's own ViewController, and the parent view controller takes care of constraints and sizing of the views.
Note: This answer is just a guide to show the way, you can find a good and detailed explanation on how it works and how to implement it HERE
Actually you can make it work earlier than iOS 5, since most of us are targeting 4.x and 5.x at the same time. I've created a solution that works in both, and it works great, few apps in appstore use it :) Read my article about this or just download and use a simple class that I've created for this purpose.
I am trying to manage 18 different views. How can I handle next-previous functionality for each view in an efficient way with this many views?
Do you see any issues managing those views in standard way?
I assume you create each view either from nib or pragmatically. You use UINavigatorController and/or UITabBarController and you add views, for tab bar controller as an array for navigator controller you pop up the first view and setup callback methods.
Other views are pushed/popped as user navigates UI. I believe that UINavigationController will unload views if there's not enough memory and load it back when needed.
If you postpone all the hard work until when the data are needed then you should be ok - unless you hit some limits but I can't tell since there's not enough details about what is in those views - complex data, images ...
The easiest way to manage all this is to create a class that derives from UIViewController and have it implement a show and a hide delegate method. Then have all your viewcontrollers derive from this class and override for any sort of custom behavior.
This way, each screen has a consistent way to go to the next view and a consistent way to return the results back to the caller.
How you navigate between views is based on what you're doing. A NavController is a good way to go through a hierarchy or take the user on a step-by-step procedure. A modal dialog works when you need the user to enter something before you can proceed.
But with a standard show/hide interface it should make it easier to manage the flow between screens.