suggestions how to achieve DatePickerDialog equivalent using mvvmcross & monotouch

Question

Currently have a Droid app implemented that in response to a button press pops up a DatePickerDialog.
As this must be a common use case does anyone have any suggestions how to achieve something similar with Touch?

Not sure if an AlertView can be used & if so how or what would be a suitable approach...

A pointer to an existing sample or project that does something similar would be appreciated.

TIA

Andreas

Answer 1

Assuming my UI designers agree (sometimes they like to do things differently)... I'd use a UIDatePicker - see

• http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/reference/UIDatePicker_Class/Reference/UIDatePicker.html
• http://jsasitorn.com/2010/06/iphone-uidatepicker-tutorial/ (Warning - ObjC!)

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As a fairly experience MonoTouch and MvvmCross dev I would do this by:

• create a custom UIView (maybe subclassing UIButton or UILabel) for my on-screen display
• inside that custom UIView when edit is needed, I would use a UIDatePicker with code like that inside https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross/blob/vnext/CrossUI/CrossUI.Touch/Dialog/Elements/DateTimeElement.cs
• for MvvmCross data-binding I would expose a public DateTime Value {get;set;} property and a public event EventHandler ValueChanged event
• to make that data-binding work I would then add some custom binding during my MvvmCross Setup - very similar to how it's now in this Droid question - Bind TimePicker & DatePicker - MVVMCross (Mono For Android)
• use that custom UIView in my 'page' with two-way binding on Value

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If I were in more of a hurry though, I might instead:

• dump a button on the screen and bind it's Title to the ViewModel DateTime
• use code-behind in my 'page' UIViewController to hook up the button TouchUpInside to some code to show a UIDatePicker
• use code-behind to respond to UIDatePicker events in order to set properties back in the ViewModel