Xamarin.Forms Custom Renderers Custom renderer for ListView

Example

Custom Renderers let developers customize the appearance and behavior of Xamarin.Forms controls on each platform. Developers could use features of native controls.

For example, we need to disable scroll in ListView. On iOS ListView is scrollable even if all items are placed on the screen and user shouldn't be able to scroll the list. Xamarin.Forms.ListView doesn't manage such setting. In this case, a renderer is coming to help.

Firstly, we should create custom control in PCL project, which will declare some required bindable property:

public class SuperListView : ListView
{
    public static readonly BindableProperty IsScrollingEnableProperty =
        BindableProperty.Create(nameof(IsScrollingEnable),
                                typeof(bool),
                                typeof(SuperListView),
                                true);

    public bool IsScrollingEnable
    {
        get { return (bool)GetValue(IsScrollingEnableProperty); }
        set { SetValue(IsScrollingEnableProperty, value); }
    }
}

Next step will be creating a renderer for each platform.

iOS:

[assembly: ExportRenderer(typeof(SuperListView), typeof(SuperListViewRenderer))]
namespace SuperForms.iOS.Renderers
{
    public class SuperListViewRenderer : ListViewRenderer
    {
        protected override void OnElementChanged(ElementChangedEventArgs<ListView> e)
        {
            base.OnElementChanged(e);

            var superListView = Element as SuperListView;
            if (superListView == null)
                return;


            Control.ScrollEnabled = superListView.IsScrollingEnable;
        }
    }
}

And Android(Android's list doesn't have scroll if all items are placed on the screen, so we will not disable scrolling, but still we are able to use native properties):

[assembly: ExportRenderer(typeof(SuperListView), typeof(SuperListViewRenderer))]
namespace SuperForms.Droid.Renderers
{
    public class SuperListViewRenderer : ListViewRenderer
    {
        protected override void OnElementChanged(ElementChangedEventArgs<Xamarin.Forms.ListView> e)
        {
            base.OnElementChanged(e);

            var superListView = Element as SuperListView;
            if (superListView == null)
                return;
        }
    }
}

Element property of renderer is my SuperListView control from PCL project.

Control property of renderer is native control. Android.Widget.ListView for Android and UIKit.UITableView for iOS.

And how we will use it in XAML:

<ContentPage x:Name="Page"
         xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms"
         xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml"
         xmlns:controls="clr-namespace:SuperForms.Controls;assembly=SuperForms.Controls"
         x:Class="SuperForms.Samples.SuperListViewPage">


  <controls:SuperListView ItemsSource="{Binding Items, Source={x:Reference Page}}"
                          IsScrollingEnable="false"
                          Margin="20">
    <controls:SuperListView.ItemTemplate>
      <DataTemplate>
        <ViewCell>
          <Label Text="{Binding .}"/>
        </ViewCell>
      </DataTemplate>
    </controls:SuperListView.ItemTemplate>
  </controls:SuperListView>
</ContentPage>

.cs file of page:

public partial class SuperListViewPage : ContentPage
{
    private ObservableCollection<string> _items;

    public ObservableCollection<string> Items
    {
        get { return _items; }
        set
        {
            _items = value;
            OnPropertyChanged();
        }
    }

    public SuperListViewPage()
    {
        var list = new SuperListView();

        InitializeComponent();

        var items = new List<string>(10);
        for (int i = 1; i <= 10; i++)
        {
            items.Add($"Item {i}");
        }

        Items = new ObservableCollection<string>(items);
    }
}