MvvmCross: How to navigate to something besides a ViewModel?

Question

What would I put in my MvxCommand to navigate to a simple URL? All mobile platforms have a mechanism to ask the OS for an Activity or ViewController that can display the contents of a URL. How would I do that with MvvmCross? One way that I know of is to put special stuff in the presentationBundle and/or parameterBundle when calling ShowViewModel that the presenter can detect to do the special OpenUrl command. But is that the best way??

Answer 1

There is a plugin which enables this - https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross/tree/v3/Plugins/Cirrious/WebBrowser

If that plugins is loaded, then a viewmodel can use:

public class MyViewModel : MvxViewModel
{
    private readonly IMvxWebBrowserTask _webBrowser;

    public MyViewModel(IMvxWebBrowserTask webBrowser)
    {
       _webBrowser = webBrowse;
    }

    public ICommand ShowWebPage
    {
        get { return new MvxCommand(() => _webBrowser.ShowWebPage("https://github.com/slodge/mvvmcross");
    }
}

You can see this used in, for example:

• https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross-Tutorials/blob/master/Sample%20-%20CirriousConference/Cirrious.Conference.Core/ViewModels/BaseViewModel.cs
• https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross-Tutorials/blob/master/Sample%20-%20CustomerManagement/CustomerManagement/CustomerManagement/ViewModels/DetailsCustomerViewModel.cs

If you ever need to create your own plugins, see https://speakerdeck.com/cirrious/plugins-in-mvvmcross