Need An Example Of Take A Picture With Monodroid And Mvvmcross

Can anyone point me to an example of take a Photo and store it using MVVMCross? I have been searching but only have found this: Monodroid Take a picture with Camera (Doesn't Impl

Solution 1:

I generally implement a service using the built-in IMvxPictureChooserTask (this is in a Plugin if using vNext):

using Cirrious.MvvmCross.ExtensionMethods;
using Cirrious.MvvmCross.Interfaces.Platform.Tasks;
using Cirrious.MvvmCross.Interfaces.ServiceProvider;

public class PhotoService 
    : IMvxServiceConsumer<IMvxPictureChooserTask>
    , IPhotoService
{
    private const int MaxPixelDimension = 1024;
    private const int DefaultJpegQuality = 92;

    public void GetNewPhoto()
    {
        Trace.Info("Get a new photo started.");

        this.GetService<IMvxPictureChooserTask>().TakePicture(
            MaxPixelDimension,
            DefaultJpegQuality,
            HandlePhotoAvailable,
            () => { /* cancel is ignored */ });
    }

    public event EventHandler<PhotoStreamEventArgs> PhotoStreamAvailable;

    private void HandlePhotoAvailable(Stream pictureStream)
    {
        Trace.Info("Picture available");
        var handler = PhotoStreamAvailable;
        if (handler != null)
        {
            handler(this, new PhotoStreamEventArgs() { PictureStream = pictureStream });
        }
    }
}

I generally register this service as a singleton during startup, and then call it from a ViewModel ICommand handler.

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One app which uses this service is the Blooor sample - see BaseEditProductViewModel.cs - this isn't a sample I had anything to do with, but I believe it brings in both Picture taking and ZXing - both using external services.

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One warning: On MonoDroid, you can see some strange/unexpected Activity/ViewModel lifecycle behaviour - basically you can see that the Activity you take the photo from is unloaded/wiped from memory during the photo taking. If this happens to your app then you'll probably need to start looking at questions like: Saving Android Activity state using Save Instance State - this isn't automatically handled in MvvmCross (yet).

I believe the Blooor sample might suffer from this issue - but whether a user would ever see it in normal app use is debatable.

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As an alternative to the IMvxPictureChooserTask service, you can also look at using some of the cross-platform APIs from Xamarin.Mobile - see MvvmCross vnext : monodroid use a VideoView inside a plugin for a possible starting place - or for Android only you can easily implement your own.