Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#

Chapter 6

Binding Data to Controls

What's in This Chapter?

• Examining how databinding works in Mono for Android
• Understanding an Android adapter
• Understanding an adapter view
• Exploring native adapters and views
• Working with cursors and lists
• Using spinners and cursors
• Using the Gallery control
• Handling nested navigation
• Dealing with grouped lists
• Displaying data with a GridView

So far we have covered the basic components and processes involved in creating an Android/Mono for Android application. We started with views and application life cycle events and then rounded out the tour of features by covering the different ways to access data. Now we can begin focusing on different ways to support interaction between these items to build feature-rich applications.

This chapter concentrates on utilizing the basic Android components to build data-driven interfaces for your app. The process of coupling a data set to a user interface is often called databinding or simply binding. Although the Android databinding mechanism differs a bit from other approaches (particularly those of ASP.NET), the Android platform has an elegant and simple way to quickly push rich data to a visual interface.

In addition to covering the basic concepts of the Android databinding story, we will walk through several different databinding scenarios. This is a common activity in any application, so we hope to provide a diverse exposure to the different tools that Mono for Android affords to help you develop your application. ...