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You're reading from  Cross-platform UI Development with Xamarin.Forms

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Published inAug 2015
Reading LevelBeginner
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ISBN-139781784391195
Edition1st Edition
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Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson
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Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson has been writing software since the early 1980s on machines ranging from the ZX81 and servers to his trusty Mac, and has used more languages than he can remember. He is a qualified scuba diver and college lecturer. Paul lives with his wife, kids, and pets, and listens to an inordinate amount of rock and metal on Primordial Radio. This is his third book for Packt.
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The messenger application


Now that we have the storage and backend sorted, we finally need to perform the messenger part. This is split into four parts:

  • Compose

  • Send/Receive

  • Contacts

  • Push

What about displaying the messages?

Messages are just a list of uneven table items. If we attach an ID to each message list from each contact, we can display the conversation. The conversation is still just a list of uneven table items. These are the simplest of tasks, so there is not much need to spend time on it.

The difficult part is the first message. If we have an ID on each message object that points to parent/previous ID, we can keep going backwards down the list. If parent/previousID is "-1", then it is at the top of the list.

For the conversations, if we have a list of all the objects with parentID of "-1", then we will have the initial message display.

The message composition

This can be done via a text entry on a keyboard or speech to text. To prevent excessive message sizes, we can set an arbitrary limit...

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Cross-platform UI Development with Xamarin.Forms
Published in: Aug 2015Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781784391195

Author (1)

author image
Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson has been writing software since the early 1980s on machines ranging from the ZX81 and servers to his trusty Mac, and has used more languages than he can remember. He is a qualified scuba diver and college lecturer. Paul lives with his wife, kids, and pets, and listens to an inordinate amount of rock and metal on Primordial Radio. This is his third book for Packt.
Read more about Paul Johnson