deltabluetrading / xamarin.forms-demo

Xamarin.Forms-demo

This repository contains C# code to build a Xamarin.Forms app that uses Zumero to sync data from the Zumero demo server at http://demo.zumero.com:8080. In addition the code demonstrates some best practices for handling data conversion, concurrent access, and backgrounding for different mobile platforms.

This code was generated by the Zumero App Generator (ZAG). If you want to generate a custom version of this app, using your own SQL Server tables, visit http://zumero.com/dev-center/zss/#zag.

Shared Code

Xamarin.Forms supports housing almost all of the application's code in a shared Portable Class Library (PCL). The interesting directories are:

• demo.Shared/Models: Contains SQLite-net (https://github.com/praeclarum/sqlite-net) bindings for each of the tables in the demo dbfile. These bindings enable you to use rich .NET objects in code, which are written to the SQLite database in a way that Zumero can sync those changes to a remote Zumero server. For information on which SQL Server column types need to be handled specially, see http://zumero.com/docs/zumero_for_sql_server_manager.html#data_type_conversion_and_limitations.

• demo.Shared/Data: Contains services which can be found via Xamarin.Forms the DependencyService.Get<>() method.

  • The DataService.cs file handles loading the database connection, and is coded to handle concurrent database operations (so that a query or update will not fail if a Zumero Sync operation is running).

  • The SyncService.cs file handles calling the Zumero Sync operation, and exposing a method to check if a sync is currently running. The Android application overrides this service, in order to insure that the sync is called from a background service.

• demo.Shared/xaml: Contains the XAML and C# code-behind definitions for all pages in the application.

Platforms

The amount of platform-specific code is as small as possible. The platforms supported are iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8.

Zumero App Generator

The Zumero App Generator creates useful example code by examining the SQL Server tables that you have exposed through your Zumero server. Generating code for other platforms and languages is supported as well. For videos walking through setting up Zumero, or using ZAG to generate code, see http://zumero.com/howto/.

Contact

If you have questions about this demo, please contact [email protected].